This is the second medal that sculptor Nigel Hall has produced for BAMS. His Bronze Shoal was announced in the first issue of The Medal in 1982. Born in 1943, Nigel Hall trained at the West of England college of Art, Bristol, and the Royal College of Art. Since then he has taught widely, and since 1967 has had numerous solo exhibitions in Britain and around the world. A comment by Ann Elliott on Hall’s The Now (2000), published in Sculpture at Goodwood: British contemporary scuplture 02/03 (2001), is equally relevant to the Soglio medal: ‘No matter how much we may analyse and reconstruct Hall’s sculpture in hte mind, the sheer physical balance and simplicity of these elemental forms is beyond mathematics, in the realm of beauty, mystery and poetry.’ The artist wrote about the medal: ‘The title Soglio refers to the Swiss mountain village of that name in the Bregaglia valley near the Italian border. It is a place I visit nearly every year, always in the depths of winter, to walk and draw both there and in the nearby Engadine. By chance, it is the valley in which Alberto Giacometti was born, whose work I have always much admiered. Built on its steep slopes, the stone houses are tightly grouped about the slender bell-tower of the church. This vertical tower is the still centre of a complex arrangement of mountain peaks, crystalline rock formations, and the forceful diagonal lines of scree. The sun appears late above th emountains and the strond contrast between light and shadow gives great emphasis to edge. ‘I have made a number of works which refer to this place, ranging in size from this, the smallest at ten centimetres, to one of five-and-a-half metres diameter sited at Schoenthal Monastery near Basel. None of them attempts to descrive the landscape but they do share certain characteristics: a stillness; a reference to verticality and its relationship to place and to the viewer; and a quiet meditative quality which requires time. Like landscape, they reward being viewed from all angles. Soglio is a sculpture composed of real geometric forms in real space, yet also has implications in its use of implied perspective as found in relief sculpture. It forms a lens through which its surroundings may be viewed and it borrows space from its location, with which it becomes one. ‘Both the seven-and-a-half ton Soglio near Basel, which required a helicopter to install, and this hand-sized version have in common a structure which finds stability when set on a horizontal surface. The central form penetrates the circumference and creates a stabilising keel, which established its still verticality.’