Architectural works by RK Taylor

ARCHITECTURAL SCULPTURE.

7.5 metre tall Green Knight. Hand beaten copper armour built on a heavy galvanised steel ‘torso’ cage that spans two large oak trunks.

From a technical point of view, the challenges associated with the practical design and construction of the considerable bulk of the giant Green Knight were as much architectural as sculptural.

Since the figure was completed in the spring of 1998 there have been other ‘architectural’ pieces.

The ‘Reading Place’ - A small oak ‘cruck’ bower at Queenswood Country Park in Herefordshire is intended to be a story telling place. Six curving oak ‘crucks’ are carved with an encrypted millennial message and two ‘ancestral’ faces. They sit beneath a beaten copper ‘ceiling’ depicting the Roman deity Janus.

‘The Story Place’ will undergo a series of transitions tracking the passage of time.
The technical design will retain the structural integrity of the bower as first of all the oak crucks shed their bark, followed over the years by the decay of the sapwood, finally leaving a soft ‘organic’ skeletal structure of bleached silver heartwood under a greened copper ceiling.

The bower, which has been planted with ivy and honeysuckle, is located beneath four ancient apple trees in an abandoned orchard. As the trees age they can be propped up from the structure, or even allowed to settle on to it, in either case, physically and metaphorically adding to the bower by their own decline.

The Hedgehog Gate in The Caves Folly Garden, A permanent organic garden at the Three Counties Showground, Malvern.

Six oak pillars are planted with box, which in time will grow into clipped green columns.

A large oak planting box, which is planted with trailing plants, tops each pillar and the gate head. A number of hand beaten copper panels are inset into the boxes, each depicting a hedgehog.

The ‘Hedgehog Gate’ stands as a memorial intended to draw attention to the impact on hedgehogs and other wildlife of the use of toxic slug pellets.