During the lockdowns of the past two and a half years, sculptor Lawrence Dicks got into a routine of taking a daily walk down to the beach near his home in Climping, West Sussex, then back to his studio. Although he varied the route each day, the repetitive pattern he fell into during this period has inspired the works in his latest exhibition, ‘Recollection’.

He explains: “A bit like when you drive your car, you know where you’re going to go and how you’re going to get there, but then you almost go into autopilot, you make all these subconscious decisions. The work has been like that, very repetitive, all these decisions made subconsciously.”

Lawrence (b. 1969) studied art in Exeter, part of the University of Plymouth, in the late 1990s, on a course which was heavily conceptual. His response was to cover his studio in paper and start making charcoal drawings “to escape the monotony of this think tank”. Then he started working in stone, inspired by some of the great sculptors of the 20th Century including Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Constantin Brancusi, as well as David Nash, Peter Randall-Page and Richard Long.

Most of the works in the current exhibition are made from Portland stone, quarried just up the coast from where Lawrence lives. He also likes working in Northern French limestone, preferring the humble origins of these northern stones to more precious marble. He manipulates the surface with undulating forms and textures which have an almost mathematical appearance, although he does it all without measurement. For the works in ‘Recollection’, he used a bull-nosed chisel to make holes in the surface of the stone, a time-consuming process as each hole requires 25 to 40 hits.

The exhibition also includes work from another series Lawrence did during lockdown, called ‘Different Loop’. On his daily visits to the beach, he would spend a long time selecting the perfect pebble, which he then took back to his studio. Using a piece of dowel created especially for the job, he covered the surface of these pebbles in polka dots, which he then joined with lines. “It’s taken thousands of years to become a pebble, so they have this natural order, then I would apply this other order covering the thing in this pattern,” he says.

By imposing pattern on natural materials to make organic, cellular objects, Lawrence hopes to create a non-verbal form of communication. “Human beings haven’t changed that much in thousands of years. We still breathe, bleed blood and think about all the same things, it’s just the world has changed and what we’ve done to it. We make up our own language as visual artists. If people find something that is relevant in the world today, that’s really great,” he says.