Adam Roud’s artistic journey began with an apprenticeship at Atelier Fine Art Castings in Hampshire, providing invaluable experience working hands-on with materials like clay, wax, and casting metals. This deep understanding of the sculpting process is evident in his remarkable body of work.
Roud’s pieces showcase his mastery of both figurative and abstract styles. His lifelike animal studies capture movement and anatomical nuances in bronze, while larger abstract works explore volume, balance, and pushing the boundaries of the medium.
Roud fuses tradition and innovation, with his works initially evoking 19th-century animaliers but revealing a distinctly modern, abstracted approach upon closer study. His multidisciplinary talents extend to teaching, as head of the respected art school, College Arts in Hampshire.
Adam Roud describes his creative approach: “My sculpture was found through experimenting with the 2D space in drawing, in exploring the poetry of line and form in 2 dimensions and 3 dimensions. The first revelation of this came from the Life Room, in realising all the
complexities of the body, the landscape, the architecture of form, and the realisation that the drawn line can occupy real space and live with us”.
It is interesting that Adam’s sculpture blurs the lines between the abstract and the figurative. On speaking about his experiments with abstract shape and his work with figurative form, Adam says, “The poetry of line and form are not exclusive to the language of either abstract or figurative. For me, they are the subject and the subject lies beneath this. The differences between the two are slight and do not present a major distinction”.
Adam is proud to have been given commissions to sculpt some fine animals for a list of important patrons and graciously acknowledges that this has set him on the path to his career as a renowned sculptor. He has recently completed a bronze for the Rambert Dance Company, extending his range further beyond the commissioned portraits of people and animals.
In the foreword to the 2021 catalogue of Roud’s work ‘Static Beauty’ Edward Horswell writes:
“It is reassuring that the age-old tradition of patronage, of which Adam is a fortunate recipient, is still alive in the UK today. Having a studio in the countryside has given him close up access to
his animal subjects which are captured in all their glory. At first glance they seem detailed in the tradition of the nineteenth century ‘Les Animaliers’ such as Pierre Jules Mene and Isidore Bonheur but on closer inspection they are not. The surfaces are, in contrast, almost smoothed down but they are so lifelike that an illusion of detail is created. It begs the question did his experiments with abstract shape inform the figurative work or vice versa? This multi-
disciplinary approach has served Adam in good stead, his enquiring eye feeding off a multitude of shapes, rendered in a range of mediums.”
Artworks
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Hunter Grazing
Adam Roud
Bronze, from an edition of 12 Cast using the lost wax process at Sculpture Castings foundry, England
