Artists - MICHAEL LYONS - Biography

Michael Lyons was born in Staffordshire in 1943. He now lives outside York in the village of Cawood, where he keeps his studio, but he also makes work in China where many of his recent large-scale works are sited.

There was an opportunity to see some of the works that have been influenced by the strong links he has now forged with that country and its culture, when the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester showed a collection of them in a one man show that ran through the winter of 2003-04. (For those that missed it, see the Virtual Tour). Last April it was announced that Lyons is the winner of a prestigious new prize that is to be awarded biennially in China: the First Guilin Yuzi Paradise International Sculpture Award.

A former Vice President of the Royal Society of British Sculptors, Lyons also had a distinguished teaching career. This included heading the Sculpture Course at Manchester Metropolitan University, and residencies in both Canada and China. (He was Guest Professor at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou). He cut back on teaching commitments to devote more time to his own work. In 1998, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (of which he is a founder member) mounted a major retrospective exhibition that looked back over twenty years of his career. There are examples of his work in private and public collections in the USA, UK, China, Germany and Canada.

Michael Lyons works mainly in steel, constructing abstract sculptures that vary enormously in scale from the intimate to the monumental. Although not illustrative, his pieces are often made in response to a particular observation he has made of his surroundings. In the earlier part of his career the industrial landscape of the Black Country provided references and inspiration, while in more recent works the natural world has brought organic elements increasingly to the fore: a stretch of water or just the play of light among leaves can be translated, in the works, into rhythmical compositions of lines and planes. In some examples these appear to rise in gravity-defying airiness, while in others rootedness and connection to the earth is emphasised and celebrated. Among his wide interests are ancient mythology and art, as well as Chinese calligraphy (and the Taoist concepts behind it). Elements drawn from these may appear at any time in a sculptural vocabulary that Lyons continues to expand.