Charles Hadcock

Andrew Lambirth, ‘Charles Hadcock: Elements’, in The Spectator, 5th July 2014, another cast illustrated p. 31

Constructed from six identical elements arranged around a central hexagon that acts as a fulcrum for the whole, Hexad III embodies many of the central themes of Charles Hadcock’s sculpture. As the title – ‘hexad’ meaning a group of six – suggests, the work belongs to a series of six sculptures that all explore the delicate balance between the mechanical processes required to make them and a more organic resonance.

The work appears to take inspiration from an urban landscape; its forms are sleek and modern and it shows the marks of its industrial origins. Hadcock achieves a remarkable harmony between the monumentality of the form and the dynamic energy of the work as a whole, much of which is due to the careful orchestration of its hexagon form and the way he ensures that the space within is as eloquent as the space without. As with much of Hadcock’s work, Hexad III reveals the artist’s background in engineering and the technical complexity of his working methods. Each piece begins with drawings and small steel models that are gradually scaled up in preparation for the casting of the individual, full-scale elements. Hadcock juxtaposes the clearly visible screws and joins which give the work its mechanical materiality against the richly textured outer surface which is cast direct from a riverbed stone, incorporating fragments and fossils accumulated over millennia. This combination of the modern and mechanical with the historical and natural is a recurring narrative in Hadcock’s work; in Hexad III it tempers the modernity of the abstract, geometrical shapes with a more ancient tactility.