YOU’VE probably never thought much about the weight of an angel, but for Ed Elliott it’s a matter of some importance.

Because his angel tips the scales at more than 30 stone, and at that size it’s not going to fly!

Ed’s cold-cast bronze sculpture – Greer, Guardian Angel – also has a wing span of about 10ft and won the Sculpture of the Year 2020 Award at the Cotswold Sculpture Park.

The angel was then dismantled into three manageable sections to travel to the renowned Royal Horticultural Society Rosemoor Winter Sculpture Exhibition in Devon, where it was illuminated for its spectacular Christmas event.

It is a real feather in the cap for the 35-year-old artist, who has had his work spotted by TV celebrity Davina McCall and shared online with her 1.2 million followers.

In fact, without much fuss, Ed, who specialises in wood and bronze and works from “an ever-growing but still humble studio” near Trumpet Corner, Ledbury, has been creating highly innovative and emotive work, with his ambitious larger-scale figurative sculptures in wood making him one of the nation’s leading sculptors in this medium.

Herefordshire art lovers will undoubtedly have come across Ed’s work over the last 10 years, during which time he has taken part in h.Art Week, winning its Young Artist Bursary in 2012 and co-curating the Young Open exhibition at The Courtyard in Hereford. “I exhibited the feature piece ‘Acclivity’ a large wooden sculpture consisting of a life size torso reaching up with arms transforming into a ladder, standing 9ft tall.”

Ed’s work is also in the permanent collection at Canwood Gallery and Sculpture Park in Checkley, and he has been a featured artist at the popular Out of Nature exhibition and at the Sculpture Trail at Hellens Manor.

His workshop lies in the shadow of the Malvern Hills, which were his early playground. “I’ve had an elemental fascination with wood since exploring the Malvern Hills as a child,” he said, “and I’ve always been creative.

“I was blessed with a creative family. My mother is a musician, a designer and a teacher, my father is a writer and musical,  and my older brother George is a musician and now a writer too. Then while studying sculpture at Cardiff School of Art and Design, I realised my uncle (dad’s brother), who lives in New Zealand, also specialises in sculpture.”

Learning this Ed determined to go and meet him.

“I’d never seen him, or a picture of him, and when I arrived in Auckland with no idea what he looked like I realised I hadn’t thought it through, but we found each other and then didn’t stop talking. I was in New Zealand for found mothers where I had an alternative apprenticeship with him in the artist’s shack he worked in in the middle of a vineyard.”

It was on his trip to the southern hemisphere that the idea of the angel figure that would launch his career was born.

He was then told in 2011 about an invitation extended to artists to make one of eight different angels for the National Trust’s Mottisfont. He applied and was successful, but it was a project that, while it gave him the opportunity to make the piece he’d dreamed of making, also nearly grounded his career before it took flight. “The cost of transporting the wood for the five foot high sculpture was more than he was being paid, and he had just seven weeks to complete the piece.

“I put everything into it because I thought I might never be able to do anything else.”

“That commission resulted in me creating more than 250 drawings focusing on anatomy, at first a bird’s wings and how they work, then human anatomy and then how that could work together. I then found I had created a recognisable character in these drawings, something I later titled ‘Greer’ which is a Celtic/Gaelic word meaning ‘Watchful’ or ‘Guardian’. “The whole idea of protection was the starting point”.

Greer has neither face nor gender though people mostly assumed it is male. “Of course it’s a muscular figure,” says Ed, adding that extraordinary power would be needed for wings with a 14 ft span.”

Angels, he admits, exert an endless fascination – “in all the images of angels you have this human figure with wings coming from the back of its shoulders. But if a human were to have wings, they’d have to be primary limbs.”

“Greer, Guardian Angel, took six to eight weeks to sculpt, then a similar time to mould and cast, and So the timescale for a large scale piece of work is usually around six months.

I often design pieces with a specific site in mind, working closely with clients. 

“This piece was a private commission and limited edition of five, designed to sit within an 11ft circular space in the client’s garden.”others in the series have gone as far afield as Scotland, America and Western Australia, but this is by no means the limit of Ed Elliott’s ambitions.

“I would eventually like to go much bigger,” he said. “My aspirations are for a very large public piece someday.”

On a wing and a prayer possibly?