Laurence Edwards

Laurence Edwards' works recently part of an art exhibition at the new EA exhibition hosted at Hedingham Castle in July 2021. His work which included 8 ft tall sculptures were placed in the grounds of Hedingham Castle.

The sculpture consists of 40 portraits of the former miners, who told their stories while being sculpted. These sessions were filmed by Doncaster College for their online archive. In February 2021, A Rich Seam was installed in the Doncaster city centre. The bronze faces sit in the handmade crevices of two 20 tonne pieces of York Stone with a miner between them.

In 2021, Edwards completed a 26ft sculpture named Yoxman, which stands next to the A12 in Suffolk. Russell Pearce of Yoxford Parish Council said that "to have that standing in the village, and be able to see it from the A12, it's a great thing for Yoxford and will really help the economy. It will really stand out, and people will want to stop and have a look around here."

In November 2019, a site specific sculpture was unveiled by Edwards for the Sainsbury Centre in Norfolk called Man of Stones. The process was documented in film by Bill Jackson. Edwards' artistic process was filmed over a period of nine months and witnessed the journey of wax to bronze. In 2015, Edward's Crouching Man was exhibited alongside more than 100 other artworks in annual exhibition on the coastline between Bondi and Tamarama.

In 2018, Edwards was commissioned by Doncaster Council to create a sculpture that celebrates the lives of those who worked in the collieries around Doncaster. The project was funded with donations from the community through a crowdfunding campaign. 'A Rich Seam' was unveiled in Print Office Street in 2021.

In 2017, the Police and Coastguard were called to "body in the water". It quickly transpired that it was Edwards' work A Thousand Tides which had been in the Butley Creek for almost a year. The figure was designed to only been seen at low tide. However, it had "stayed on the surface longer than it should." Edwards further remarked that "I've always been a bit worried that a helicopter would spot it and want to rescue it."

Laurence Edwards has exhibited in Australia since 2009 and has had two exhibitions alongside Messums Wiltshire at the Mary Place Gallery. He is currently helped by a dedicated team of around ten people running two studios, one with a large scale foundry in Halesworth, and the other in a converted Fire Station in Saxmundham, Suffolk.

Phil Cairney's film 'A Thousand Tides' chronicled the making and placement of a figure left to slowly sink in the estuarine mud flats of the Butley creek on the east coast. This film is complemented by another made by Aldeburgh films, called 'The Creek Men'  it chronicles the voyage of three 8 ft bronze giants, on a raft up the river Alde to the Aldeburgh Festival at Snape in 2008.

In 2008, Edwards created three 8ft bronze figures inspired by the marshes around his studio at the time. These were exhibited at the Aldeburgh Festival, after a voyage on a raft along the river Alde. The writer Robert Macfarlane comments on his first meeting with the figures, "I came over time to see the Creek Men not as eldritch paramilitaries set on vengeance, but as more ethically neutral emanations of the Suffolk terrain itself. [...] Chronic and chthonic, they were indigenes – and there was an aspect of tolerance to their presence, as well as of threat."

In 2006, he won the Royal Society of Portrait Sculpture Award for his work Grin and Bare and became an Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors in 2012. His current studio and foundry are in Halesworth, Suffolk.

In 2002 'Yew Tree' evolved into 'Butley Mills Studios' set in the marshlands of the Butley Creek. Here an artist community grew around a thriving bronze foundry of which, Keir Smith, Sir Christopher Le Brun, Brian Taylor, were notable members.

After being awarded a Henry Moore bursary and the Angeloni Prize for Bronze Casting. He travelled India and Nepal studying traditional casting techniques with an Intach travelling scholarship. The knowledge gleaned allowed him to establish his first foundry and studio in 1990 at Clock House in Bruisyard. In 1992, he established Yew Tree Farm Studios, in Laxfield, an artistic community as well as a foundry. It was here amongst other initiatives that he cofounded the US-UK Iron pour exchange and residency program with Professor Coral Lambert of the National casting institute Alfred University, New York State