Even by art world standards it was an exceptional setting for a sculpture show. Clearwell Caves form part of a network of natural limestone caverns located more than 100 feet below the ancient Forest of Dean in the far west of England. They have been mined for their natural deposits of iron ore and natural ochre pigment for nearly 5,000 years; art historians, meanwhile, believe that Michelangelo used Clearwell’s rare caput mortuum purple for his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel.
This summer, more recent art bigwigs became associated with Clearwell when its tunnels and chambers were occupied by Back to the Cave: The Full Spectrum, a show featuring some 70 works by contemporary artists including Damien Hirst, Antony Gormley, Tavares Strachan, Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas, as well as late artists such as Lynn Chadwick.
The exhibition was organised by Rungwe Kingdon and Claude Koenig, the husband and wife co-founders of Pangolin Editions sculpture foundry, which casts and fabricates sculpture in all mediums imaginable for the biggest names. Hirst has called Pangolin “the best there is in the business”. Kingdon is famously discreet about who he works with—some artists want us to believe they did it all themselves—but name any major project requiring casting, fabricating and more recently digital imaging and printing, and it’s very likely to have been made using Pangolin expertise. “We work to make the technique fit the artist’s concept and their language: we are not the artist, we are the enabler, and that’s a huge privilege,” is how Kingdon modestly describes its role.
Resourcefulness plus muscle
Many of the artists on show in Clearwell Caves are Pangolin clients whose works were made at the company’s massive foundry complex, situated about an hour away, outside the West Country town of Stroud. It’s the second show that Rungwe and Claude have curated in Clearwell. Whether or not Pangolin made the pieces—a great many were fabricated in the foundry—it took all the skill of their technical team to manoeuvre so many large, heavy, delicate objects into such a deep, dark, damp place, using what Kingdon describes as “ingenuity and a great deal of heave-ho”.
In honour of Clearwell’s role as a provider of artist’s pigments since the Middle Ages, the overarching theme of the exhibition was colour in sculpture, and it lived up to its title by featuring the full chromatic spectrum. Down in these rocky caverns were works made using a multitude of metals and patinas, from Gormley’s cast iron cuboid figure to Hirst’s quintet of cast and painted bronze Disney characters encrusted with trompe l’oeil coral, from his epic Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable series of 2017.
Gavin Turk, Lite (2009)
@Gavin Turk. Photo: Steve Russell Studios
Other artists made new pieces that responded directly to their surroundings in a range of hues, from street artist STIK’s The Ochre Man drawn directly onto the cave walls in Clearwell’s russet ochre, to Ian Dawson’s vivid 3D-printed, recycled plastic rendition of one of the Avebury standing stones, covered in a textile-like pattern.
Geology, ghosts and gloom
I visited Clearwell with Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas, both long-term Pangolin clients, who agreed that their work assumed very special qualities within this subterranean environment. Hambling’s Henrietta Eating a Meringue (2001) was inspired by her late lover and muse Henrietta Moraes. But here, perched on a natural shelf and framed by rocky crags, its swirling mass seemed part of the surrounding geology, while also taking on a ghostly energy as it emerged out of the gloom. Hambling reckoned she’d never seen the work look better.
Lucas’s sculpture She Came in Through the Bathroom Window (2023) was made specifically with Clearwell Caves in mind. A continuation of her ongoing Bunny sculptures made from kapok-stuffed tights, this shiny blood-red sinuous personage made from cast, lacquered bronze had an especially eerie demeanour as it seemed to slither off the back of a concrete chair, clad in towering aubergine-coloured ankle boots and with antennae-like breasts in place of a head. It was as if a sexily sinister life form had crept out from the dark heart of the caves.
The Clearwell Caves show has ended, and all the sculptures have returned back into daylight. However, Lucas’s new Bunny is soon to be reunited with the smaller original plaster version of Hambling’s Henrietta sculpture in the more accessible Piccadilly spaces of Sadie Coles and Frankie Rossi, for a joint exhibition of both artists’ work. Even though I am greatly looking forward to revisiting this artistic dialogue, nothing can beat the experience of that first underground encounter.
• Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas: OOO LA LA, Frankie Rossi Art Projects & Sadie Coles HQ, Bury Street, London, 20 November-1 January 2026
