Gary Breeze

“…Breeze works as an ethnographer as much as a carver.… His work is immersed in the particularities of words and voice and culture. He restores language to us through his lettering.” (Edmund de Waal 2005)

Using enduring materials like slate and limestone and his own letterforms, Gary Breeze captures languages, dialects, vernacular vocabulary, evoking potent feelings of timelessness and immediacy, identity of place and people in his work.

Prior to his visit to Chatsworth, Gary had been looking at the legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which was written by a late 14^th century monk living on the Derbyshire/Staffordshire border, in a Middle English dialect local to Chatsworth. This text, hovering behind almost understood, semi-familiar word-shapes, has been inscribed on a very rare local limestone, which is no longer quarried. Looking at the inventory in the 6^th Duke’s Handbook (written in 1844), Gary was very much taken by the degree of mimicry, trompe l’oeil and objects masquerading as something other, scattered through the house: “Chatsworth is imbued with witty artifice”. This is captured in the accompanying photograph, Translation, which further underlines the ephemeral nature of what he is trying to document.

Gary established his own studio in 1993 and quickly gained a reputation for technically accomplished lettering, design, and innovative content, which subsequently won him a number of major public commissions. In 2004 his first solo exhibition was held at the New Art Centre. His sun-dial, a commission made in 2010, lives in the garden at Chatsworth.