|
|
 |
| |
Terry McGinity |
Bold witness of a war-torn world
Terry McGinity packs rich experience and empathy into his dramatic sculpture, writes Simon Wroe
HEWN out of the various limestone blocks in Terry McGinity’s garden workshop are scenes and subjects one might not expect to see as sculptures.
Imitation Davids and “shiny neo-classical stuff,” as McGinity puts it, are thin on the ground.
Instead, his St John’s Wood flat is choked with reliefs of refugees queuing for food in
West Hampstead, representations of young girls blown up in the
Iraq War or of the American activist Rachel Corrie, who was
crushed and killed by an Israeli Defence Force bulldozer in Gaza in 2003.
The body of work – 20 pieces of which are on show at Burgh House in Hampstead from next week – is McGinity’s response to all the different strands of his 60 years’ experience; from his career as an actor (he played opposite Ralph Fiennes in the Broadway production of Hamlet) to his current role as a peripatetic special needs teacher for Camden primary school children.
It is not surprising if he gives prominence to the hardships and suffering inflicted by war: his partner is an art therapist whose father was detained in the Japanese prisoner of war camps, and many of the children with emotional or behavioural problems whom he teaches at Richard Cobden or Brecknock School come from war-torn backgrounds.
Last summer he spent five weeks giving clay modelling sessions in the Jenin Refugee Camp in the West Bank.
McGinity does not know the pain of these stories first-hand, but he believes his work as an actor allows him “to step into the shoes” of people he sees.
For 13 years he has searched “like a magpie” for things that move him, that might move others too, carving bold forms out of Ancaster stone or Black Kilkenny sourced from a stone yard in Northampton.
In earlier days, before he had his studio, the sculptor would haul his work in a wheelbarrow, whatever the weather, to a quiet corner of Regent’s Park to sit and chip away.
People would sidle up to investigate. One policeman told him he had seen rapes and murders in the park, but he never seen anything “like that”.
McGinity, a man who places great significance in art’s power to affect, took it as a fine compliment.
|
|
|
|
|
|
