In the 1980s my friend Nicholas Pope was a young lion of British art, a pioneer of the use of natural materials. He was, with Tim Head, the British representative at the 1980 Venice Biennale, and a participant in the Arts Council exhibitions The Condition of Sculpture (1975) and Nature As Material (1980).
Nick, who has died aged 77, would test his materials to the edge of destruction, taking, for example, pieces of Bath stone up to their shatterpoint in Mr and Mrs Arnolfini (1978). If he had added one more gram of weight or degree of slope to his 1.8 metre high Leaning Chalk (1975), the work would have collapsed. As the Tate catalogue entry for Stacked Lead (1976) puts it: “The works in this series are only correctly exhibited if they appear to be about to fall over.”
