By Andrew Lambirth

A review of the Fafners' cave exhibition - The Royal British Society of Sculptors - November 2009.

In Siegfried, the third of the four operas in Richard Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung, Fafner's Cave is called Neidhohle, or the Cave of Envy. Fafner, the last of the giants, slew his father to obtain a vast horde of treasure, at which point he changed into a dragon to guard it. He in turn can only be slain by the broken sword, Nothung, which must be re-forged. Siegfried achieves all this, and into the bargain gains the ability to understand the language of the birds, once he has imbibed some of the dragon's blood. This saves his life, and he goes on to further adventures. 'Fafner's Cave' as a title for Charles Hadcock's latest exhibition - and by extension, latest body of work - is therefore a designation laden with symbolism. Furthermore, Fafner is not only the dragon in Wagner's Ring Cycle, he is also a dragon in Manx folklore, proposing  an interesting side-link here to Bryan Kneale, Manx sculptor and one of Hadcock's most revered teachers. Thus do the ramifications multiply.

Hadcock's wife Camilla grew up on the Isle of Man, and it has become something of a second home to him, particularly as the geological profile of the island has much to interest and beguile him. In particular, the geometry and textures of the rocks at Scarlett Point in Castletown have inspired him to many hours' study and drawing. The Manx connection is a strong one, but the impact of Wagner must not be under-estimated. Hadcock is enthralled by the Ring Cycle in its entirety, so when he was offered the chance to go to Bayreuth last year, the experience took on the nature of a long-cherished ambition fulfilled. His spirits were lifted, and he felt a shift and re-focusing of the emotions. He identified Fafner with a great weight of personal grief, a weight that was miraculously lifted at Bayreuth by the killing of the dragon. Like Siegfried, Hadcock felt that he could not only hear the birds singing again, but understand them; likewise, he felt he could now understand his own sculptural language as never before.

Music has long been an inspiration and delight to Hadcock, and its structures have played a key role in his sculptural thinking. (Look, for instance, at the monumental Passacaglia on Brighton beach, which refers to the repetition of a musical theme stretching over several bars. He calls it 'a musical composition in slow triple time composed on a repeated bass line.' The reference is also to old dance music which was often played in the streets - a charming enrichment of Hadcock's seaside siting of his work.) Another recent large-scale piece is called Adagio (2007), and in the spring of 2003, Hadcock held an exhibition at Canary Wharf of Sculpture in the Workplace (curated by his long-term supporter Ann Elliott), entitled The Silent Symphony. This featured such works as Cantus, Sesqui, Accord and - a later addition to the group - Echo. The sculptor's interest and fluency in mathematics combined with his passion for music, backed up by his engineering skills and love of poetry and architecture, present a formidable matrix from which to produce work.

Engineering comes naturally to him, and he has trodden his own route, discovering his own processes and building his confidence along the way. This has enabled him to look back at his familial antecedents with respect and understanding, but also from a position of acquired skill and personal knowledge. His great-grandfather, Sir George Hadcock (1861-1936) was an expert in artillery science and became Manager of the Gun Shops for the armaments manufacturer, Armstrong Whitworth. (The firm later diverged into Vickers Armstrong and Armstrong Siddeley.) As technical expert, Sir George was responsible for the design and development of guns and gun mountings for military and naval ordnance. His extensive experimental work resulted in considerable discoveries, not least the breech-loading spiral for the naval guns which now reside outside the Imperial War Museum. Other members of the family, while perhaps not quite so distinguished in public service, continued to work in the field of engineering (both his father and uncle in aeronautics), with Hadcock's father later pursuing a career as a finishing expert for engineers, a specialist in the polishing of metals.

Hadcock was brought up on a combination of maths, music and art. (His father said: 'that'll get you anywhere'.) He showed promise at the piano until he relinquished his ambitions in that direction after seeing Richter play. In terms of art, his father was an amateur watercolourist and his grandfather an etcher. Engineering was in the blood, so both two- and three-dimensional expression came naturally to him. That particular combination of fine art and practical engineering is unusual in a sculptor. Hadcock's familiarity with engineering processes has led him to work with industrial rather than fine art foundries. A feature of his work which seems to identify it as "engineered" rather than "sculpted" (if such a distinction may usefully be made), is the frequent bolting together of parts. Yet actually Hadcock first used this method at the recommendation of another revered teacher at the Royal College, Phillip King. Look for instance at the Caesura series, relating directly to Hadcock's understanding of poetic structure, made between 1994 and 2002, and constructed from repeated elements locked and bolted together.

At school at Ampleforth, Hadcock was taught by John Bunting (1927-2002), himself a talented carver and draughtsman, who'd been taught by Leon Underwood and John Skeaping. Bunting in turn taught Hadcock to draw in the Underwood style - with his particular emphasis on the way light revealed three-dimensional form - and this helped to add a foundation of professionalism to the boy's innate talent. It was through drawing that Hadcock first came to terms with his growing ambition to be a sculptor.

This is not the place to re-trace his early years at Gloucester College of Arts and Technology (1984-7) and the Royal College of Art (1987-9), or his first solo exhibitions which included the 1996 Reeds Wharf display where I first encountered his sculpture. Hadcock's work has gained immeasurably in ambition and assurance since those more tentative excursions, but there has been a notable consistency and continuity of interest which have marked his endeavour as whole-heartedly serious.

The dialogue between engineered components and the organic, which is such a significant aspect of Hadcock's work, was given a major boost in 2006 by his creative partnership with the engineers Gilbert Gilkes and Gordon Ltd. Specialists in hydropower, Gilkes provided one of the main technical inspirations behind Hadcock's recent sculpture with their hydro turbine pattern. Since his student days, Hadcock has been fascinated by casts of found shapes (from polystyrene packaging, for example) and in subsequent years he has developed further the notion of the handmade and the ready-made, and their complex inter-relation. His latest body of work exploits the essential links between engineering and sculpture, art and industry, to a greater degree than ever before, and more successfully. Here are the seeds for a decade's discoveries and developments as Hadcock deepens his game and pushes forward his sculptural ambitions.

A work from that 2006 group, Transformation, displays a crisply-defined form within a split and pierced block, like a fossil in a rock, the fossil in this case being based on the shape of a small water turbine. As the turbine's forms had originally been suggested by fossils, Hadcock's invention neatly returns the compliment. This is typical of him: the playing with ideas which on one level is witty but which also strikes a fundamental resonance offering more lasting satisfactions.

Look, for example, at his latest sculpture in the landscape, Verticil (2009), the large cast iron sculpture Hadcock has recently installed in Hanover Square. It is rusting gently, its surface echoing the colours of autumn, toning in beautifully with the leaf-fall taking place around it when I first visited it in October. It's a chunky piece (it weighs in at 10 tons) which seems at first to be built around a diagonal, a propped spindle from which its various fans or fins emanate.

Then, as you move round it, its form changes, it becomes more stepped and cog-like, alternatively appearing to be fashioned from two plated spheres, a smaller within a larger. It is also helical, recalling the structure of sea-shells. The exterior surface is a rusty orange, decorated with trickles of colour where the rain or dew has gathered then run off its convex flanks. The form is presented in sections, slices twisted from the vertical on a spiral like a series of steps. The effect, as with so many of Hadcock's sculptures, is of machinery crossed with organic life, in this case, an oceanic or marine creature. It seemed somehow appropriate, that on the mild autumn day of my visit, a tramp was sleeping in its lee.

Hadcock is keen to distance himself from the notion of "public sculpture", around which so many misconceptions and prejudices have draped themselves. Instead, he is moving towards a practice of sculpture in the studio (and thence in the gallery), which can be adapted to carefully-selected sites in the landscape. Context is all- important, as Henry Moore understood. Refreshingly, in this age of arrogant ignorance, Hadcock is a sculptor aware of art history, and actively interested in the achievements of the past. For example, the 1930s are important to him, and particularly the work of a key modernist such as Barbara Hepworth. Or to take an example from architecture, Hadcock loves Hawksmoor's London churches and the way he uses stone both sculpturally and structurally.

Much of today's art is criticized for being the triumph of presentation over content. Hadcock is deeply concerned with presentation, but his work is also strong on content. One of the key issues of Modernism was bringing the sculpture off the plinth and down into everyday space - into the rooms we live in, the buildings we visit. Hadcock wants to put it back on the plinth and to focus on presenting it beautifully. Not only is each of his recent smaller sculptures presented on a plinth to secure proper attention, but it is also mounted on a block of polished wood (English beech for the current group of works). This return to the plinth is a calculated strategy to gain a little distance, a pause for thought in the world of communication-overload in which we live. Somehow an artist must not only draw attention to his work but also create an aura of silence around it to allow for meditation on the part of the spectator.

The forms of his new work derive on the one hand directly from engineering, and on the other from the natural world, and from that great panoply of man-made objects that infect and dominate our imaginations. References abound, most obviously in the natural world to the nautilus, the ammonite and the spiral. On the other hand, the pump volute for a water turbine that you might find in a toolmaker's workshop is a close cousin of Hadcock's sculptures, but he has not simply appropriated it and changed the context in the manner of Duchamp with his infamous urinal. He has completely re-built it, and in the process, irrevocably altered not only its connotations, but also its form and beauty. The transformation is subtle but entire. Hadcock carves by hand the wooden patterns for his sculptures in exactly the same way an engineer would proceed.

To examine the individual new sculptures in detail: Volutes I and II are polished vertical horns, small in stature. Volute I is thinner in profile, skinnier in terms of breadth of metal between central piercing and edge, allowing, as it were, a wider aperture for the turbine to fit into. There's no attempt to deny the machine source of the work, but the individual forms are subjected to an intense purification process. The geometry of man-made objects is linked to the found reference of fossil geometry. Hadcock is concerned to reduce the industrial referencing to basic shapes: the engineering connotations are stripped away from the pump volute and it returns to pure form. The small volute sculptures are painted black inside to create a striking contrast with the warm gold of their polished bronze exteriors. The volute is like a musical instrument - the smaller ones looking like French horns. The volute sculptures are not vessels, you cannot drink from them, though another reference is the mythical horn of plenty. The joyful sound of Siegfried's horn, which is the lure which brings Fafner out of his cave, echoes around these shining objects.

The actual angle of presentation is also essential to consider. Volute III is natural bronze coloured, rather than gold, a plumper form, and the largest of the Volute series, though the form is in fact slightly abbreviated. It looks wonderful lying down, but even better standing up, so Hadcock has mounted it vertically on its plinth. Assured, even jaunty, it suggests an undeniably elegant life-form. It was inspired by a Roman torso in the Fitzwilliam, and particularly by its swelling belly, presented here transfigured in all its glory. Hadcock started by drawing his idea for it, but couldn't make this work; he had to carve it in pattern-maker's wood, a soft close-grained pine. The process is then to make an engineering pattern, coloured in red and black, where red stands for metal and black is the void. Here is the engineering approach in full flight. It would be fascinating one day to mount an exhibition of Hadcock's various patterns as a way of illustrating the industrial procedures he adopts.

Volute IV is the only one lying down, looking a little like a giant ram's horn snail. Hadcock has already envisaged this sculpture on a far larger scale and decided from the beginning that its finest and aesthetically most pleasing profile when made bigger would be as a reclining form. Volute V is tall-necked as a swan, immensely elegant, and like a musical clef at the beginning of a stave. All the geometry and mathematics for this poignantly beautiful series of sculptures are worked out beforehand via detailed technical drawing. Hadcock still uses his great-grandfather's geometrical instruments, his compasses and dividers. He draws fluently and is always reaching for pencil and paper to explain himself more clearly. When it comes to sculpture, he roughs out his ideas on paper by means of drawing, or in three-dimensions with card or plaster.

Vessel is a slightly earlier piece, from 2006, and looks back to the world of Transformation. A prototype variant of the polished volute, it embraces the same essential form. The main difference is the stone texture wrapping, with its direct references to the rocks and fossils that inspired the geometry. Also the square-section top opening is less obviously seductive and refers the viewer back to Hadcock's large cast-iron sculptures. The irony of its name - here is a vessel with a void at its centre, that will hold nothing securely - is not lost. Outwardly, it is a more physical and perhaps more barbaric piece, but the inner and underlying grace is evident nonetheless.

The series of wall relief panels in nickel bronze, entitled Leitmotiv, are like the two-dimensional drawings for the sculptures. Their superbly textured surfaces ingrained with centripetal or centrifugal whorls, are arrived at by casting a rock-face, which is then cut up and reassembled and cast again. Note the triangular shapes in Leitmotiv I - monohedral non-periodic symmetrical tiling, to be technical for a moment. Leitmotiv II develops a variant: one-armed spiral tiling using an eight-sided protile. These shapes and patterns, with their references to Hadcock's beloved tessellations in limestone terraces, once again link the natural with the theoretic, the organic with the mathematical and geometric, besides being very beautiful objects. Hadcock remarks the seductiveness of the material: 'it's got a depth and weight because of the nickel.' This admixture of metal allows greater range and variation of colour, with silver and gold tones coming through the darker material.

Hadcock likes to see these more two-dimensional versions of his ideas in conjunction with the three-dimensional sculptures to which they're related. The contrast and confluence are enjoyable. Two larger and more complex pieces round out this particular body of new work. The first is Helisphere, which involves a helix going round a sphere. It is made of very heavily bees-waxed iron with a hand-carved surface like a rock face, turned spirally on a sphere. 'I wanted it to be like a found object', says Hadcock, opening up his range of reference once again. Last year he visited Ballinglen Arts Centre in County Mayo on the west coast of Ireland, and spent some time drawing the rocks on the beach there.

The second is Torsion, a hefty great stepped tower or ziggurat, which twists and turns up the spiral. Walking up its exterior steps is rather like climbing a cliff-face, or climbing the globe. Ascending the world. This sculpture relates to other sectioned sculptures Hadcock has made in the past but takes their impetus further; it is like the beginning of a stairway to the stars. (I am reminded of William Blake's evocative line engraving of a figure resting a long ladder from the earth to a crescent moon, and beginning to mount it. The title is appropriately I Want! I Want! and comes from The Gates of Paradise.) Interestingly, Hadcock has been considering turning this sculpture over on its side, and testing its formal efficacy as a kind of reclining figure. To this spectator, the important thing about Torsion is its upward thrust: it is imaginatively completed by the firmament and the constellations which rise above. It is also nicely evocative of the sculptor's towering will to work.

To return finally to Fafner: the dragon is often said to be the most universal of mythical creatures, not necessarily or even essentially an evil beast, but rather embodying the elemental forces of chaos and cosmic order. In the West, it symbolizes earth, air, fire and water, for it resides in the depths of the earth or water, it can fly and it also breathes fire. It's a pretty potent all-round symbol for a sculptor. Charles Hadcock has adopted it now to good effect, as he offers us some of the latest and most remarkable treasures from Fafner's Cave.

Andrew Lambirth                                                                October - November 2009