Extraordinary sculptures among artwork at Tyrrell Art Gallery’s exhibition at C3 Church in Cambridge

Tyrrell Art Gallery will host an international art exhibition at the C3 Church in Cambridge on Saturday (19 July) with some extraordinary work.

Running from 11am-4pm at the Brooks Road church, work by Ukrainian artist Khrystyna Kozyuk, Austrian artist Ernestine Tahedl, Dutch artist Irene Hoff, Colombian artist Rosario d’Espinay Saint-Luc, Brazilian artist Téia Peters, Portuguese artist Luciana Rosado, and UK artists including David Bennison, Louisa Corr, Walter Holmes and Peter Corr will be on display.

Sculptures by Cambridge-based Canadian artist Colleen McLaughlin Barlow, from her unique series called Whale Dreams, will also be on show.

Comprising ‘portraits’ of whale bones individually sculpted into clay, the works take months of careful observation in an animal anatomy lab.

The sculptures are dried and fired into terra cotta before being shipped off to a glass foundry where experts create moulds taken from the original sculpture. The mould is filled with wax and placed inside a large foundry kiln before engineers specialising in flow dynamics figure out the best way for the molten lead crystal to feed into the mould. The wax then shoots out small strategically placed holes in the mould and is replaced with the molten lead crystal. The entire kiln is then very slowly cooled in an expensive process that can take weeks.

All the pieces are originals and, even if the shape is from the same mould, the colours of the crystal are uniquely different in each sculpture.

Tyrrell Art Gallery founded in 2008, is an independent online gallery based in Cambridge.