Raymond Attfield

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Raymond Attfield (b.1938) is both an architect and a musician. As well as running his own practice, he previously formed the Urban Architecture Research Unit at London’s Metropolitan University. His fascination with the relationship between urbanism and natural world began through this body of work. Produced over decades in the artist’s Provence studio, No 20 Arts is proud to share Attfield’s beautiful works to a wider audience.

Exhibited in Near and Elsewhere is ten years of creativity in which Attfield revisits fragments of ideas around this relationship. He does not seek to develop any kind of thesis but rather to work physically with his chosen raw materials until they become something else — an object whose physical presence has its own identity and meaning awaiting to be read and interpreted by its viewer’s subjective judgement.

He lets himself be guided by his chosen materials — their physical potential, and their cultural significance; tar relates to earth, wax and silicone to embalming, wood with life and growth.

Of his special relationship with trees, Attfield says:

“Trees have always fascinated me and commanded my respect. With their great life span, their age revealed in a cross-cut, or death expressed in a discarded or burnt fragment. Now that I’m 84, ageing is my preoccupation; time passing, growth and change, uniqueness, loss, eternity perhaps. Newness offers me little”.