Exhibition: 11th September – 5th October

Carol’s personal art tour: 2pm – 3pm

This autumn, Byard Art is proud to welcome back the acclaimed sculptor Carol Peace for her latest solo exhibition. Spanning themes of love, courage, solitude, and the quiet beauty of everyday life, Carol’s bronze figures speak with both tenderness and strength, inviting you into a deeply human world

Carol’s work captures moments of reflection and connection, a mother holding her child, the playful loyalty of a dog, the silence of swimming as a metaphor for life. Through clay and bronze, she translates raw emotion into form, preserving fleeting gestures and marks in sculptures that feel timeless yet immediate. As Carol herself says, “My sculptures are messages of love. Parcels wrapped up in the shape of you. That’s why you smile, it’s the love, hidden inside.”

About Carol Peace

Born in Harrogate in 1970, Carol has dedicated more than three decades to exploring the nuances of the human condition through sculpture. After completing a Fine Art degree in Sculpture at Winchester School of Art, she established her first studio at Bristol’s Spike Island before later moving to the Paintworks studio in the city. Today, she divides her time between Hackney, London, and a converted chapel in Hay-on-Wye, Wales, where solitude and countryside rhythms inspire much of her work.

Her practice has always been rooted in drawing, she sees it as the foundation for her sculptural language. Clay, with its immediacy and fluidity, allows her to capture the spontaneity of line before transforming it into the permanence of bronze. Over the years, Carol’s work has been exhibited widely across the UK and internationally, with solo shows in London, Athens, Zurich, France, Spain, and the Netherlands. Large-scale sculptures of hers can also be seen at Glyndebourne and at The Dorchester’s country house hotel in Ascot.

Beyond her own practice, Carol co-founded the Bristol Drawing School in 2007, serving as its Artistic Director until 2011, nurturing the creative journeys of other artists.

Themes in the Exhibition

Carol’s upcoming show at Byard Art embraces a range of interconnected themes:

• Love in its many forms – from the intimacy of partnership to the profound bonds of motherhood and childhood, and even the devotion of a beloved dog.
• Courage and Protest, capturing the human spirit’s resilience and strength.
• Swimming, a recurring metaphor for life’s rhythm, challenge, and surrender.
• The Natural World, reflecting both beauty and grounding.
• Solitude and Silence, celebrating peace, stillness, and self-reflection.
• Home and Belonging, exploring what it means to feel rooted – or adrift.
• Making and Navigation, highlighting the role of drawing, mapping, and sculpture as ways of orienting oneself through life.

These themes reveal Carol’s ability to weave the personal with the universal, offering visitors the chance to see themselves in her work.

Poems from Carol

Carol often pairs her sculpture with poetry, giving voice to the emotions her figures hold. In her own words:

“The sculptures are made in clay, which like charcoal is quick to make marks with, once finished they are cast into bronze, those fluid marks of the making are then fixed forever. My work is about the every person, the you, the me.”

In a poem written in Wales while creating this new body of work, she reflects on solitude and the quiet power of stillness:

“Sunk in stone moss, words

weep dew. But silence makes

sculpture and quiet days rest

on each other and whisper love.”

Another, Making in Hay, speaks of carving out space in the rush of modern life:

“I have collected peace

and put her in the clay

so, within the rush, you

have space, every day.”

Visit the Exhibition

From 11th September to 5th October, we invite you to join us at Byard Art to experience the world of Carol Peace. Her figures hold both the weight of stillness and the lightness of joy, drawing you closer not just to her work, but to yourself.