Linlithgow Threshold

Linlithgow Threshold

Linlithgow Threshold

By: Simon Beeson, 2001
Medium: cast bronze
Size: 79 x 79 x 21mm
Cast by: Niagara Falls
Edition: 30

Category:

Simon Beeson (b. 1961) is an architect, who teaches at Edinburgh College of Art. Most of his professional practice is in public art commissions. In 1996 he designed Simmons Gallery in London, which sells coins, medals, and contemporary jewellery. He has been attending BAMS and FIDEM events with his partner Nicola Moss since 1989. At the FIDEM 2000 exhibition in Weimar he exhibited a simpler Threshold medal, also with a small stair. About his BAMS medal, Linlithgow Threshold, the artist writes: \\\’In 1999 I moved to the town of Linlithgow, just west of Edinburgh. My new morning walk to the station took me past the end of the loch with a view of Linlithgow Palace, birth-place of Mary Queen of Scots, and now a ruin. During the first few months here, I modelled this small wall from a piece of air-dry clay. The medal reflects an interest in both the inhabited wall of castles in Scotland and Northumberland, and the two sided similarities of walls and medals. As with previous medals it acts as a threshold between two worlds, an outside and an inside, the various windows and stairs indicating an inhabited quality, a human presence. Usually I prefer to cast plaster into constructed moulds, but the modelled clay has a more tactile presence, even including a thumb impression, which somehow adds to the sense of inhabitation rather than simply formal composition. Now we are in a new home with a view of the palace, which I find constantly fascinating.