Photo: Chris White
Juliet and Jamie Gutch are a husband and wife artistic partnership who live in Ilkley and design and make mobile sculptures. Their current and past work includes a reflection on the sounds and shapes of nature and the impact of the local Yorkshire landscape. As they explain on their website (2015):
Living in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, we wanted to start responding to the local landscape in our work. At the same time we are keen to explore the medium of mobiles as one which is akin to music in the way that a number of ‘notes’ are created from which the individual sculptures are then ‘composed’. The mobiles in our new series we are currently working on are inspired by small sounds of Ilkley Moor.
‘Marquette for Murmuration’ Commission. Image: see artists’ website, below.
They work with wood, metal and other materials, and their suspended sculptures can vary in size, from commissioned giant installations, e.g. for John Lewis at Stratford, East London (see image below), to small scale models.
Mobile sculpture for the John Lewis store, Westfield Shopping Centre, East London; part of a series titled ‘An Exaltation of Larks’.
They have exhibited work at the Jaggedart gallery in London, and at COLLECT, the International Art Fair, held at the London Saatchi gallery. It has also been shown at the London Art Fair, via Jaggedart, and has featured in the Ilkley Art Trail.
Image: see artists’ website, below.
Their sculptures have also been commissioned by commercial organisations, including, as mentioned earlier, for John Lewis, and also for BP and at Canary Wharf, London. Hospitals in Northumbria, Gloucester, Milton Keynes, Middlesex and the London area, have also commissioned work, where the sculptures can present a positive aesthetic and therapeutic influence to visitors (see example below). They also lead workshops for children in local schools, where the idea of balance can be explored and mobiles created.
‘Murmuration of Starlings’, large mobile sculpture created for the Northumbria Healthcare NHS Fund; see other examples on artists’ website; link shown below.
Artists’ Website: Juliet & Jamie Gutch