Jack in his old studio at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, 2023. Photograph by Hannah Gardner Seavey.

“It’s inevitable that childhood weaves its way into one’s work”, Jack told me. He grew up surrounded by the building trade in Cambridgeshire, in a family without any direct connection to the arts. His father was a builder with an engineering background and his mother worked in various ways with agriculture and horticulture. When Jack was eleven, the Handscombes embarked on a project to build their own house on a shoestring budget and for two years, the family of four lived on-site in a collection of sheds, tents and a small touring caravan while the house took shape around them.

“A building site may not seem like a typical creative backdrop”, Jack says, “but to a child, it is an endlessly generative playground. Our games all incorporated the off-cuts, rubble and tools that surrounded us. Often to my distress, my father taught me the correct way to handle tools and materials. This foundation gave me a sympathy with these processes, and an appreciation of the labour involved in creation, artistic or otherwise. Perhaps this is why my work leans towards the structural, the architectural; why it speaks more of form and concept rather than gesture or expressiveness”.

Mr Handscombe’s lessons are manifest in Jack’s life and work today. The legacy of construction – and indeed the importance of hard work – is clear in Jack’s utterly practical approach to solving the successive problems which amount ultimately to the act of creation. Old habits are there in the intricacy of his most accomplished stones: the painstaking delineation of individual ears of wheat in a recent carving of a wheatsheaf might be a far cry from the Airfix models Jack loved as a child; or on the other hand, it might seem a natural if notable graduation for such a steady hand. His professional CV is quite formidable, laying bare a strong practical skillset: car body work, silicone mould-making, welding. Unsurprisingly, Jack’s CV lists construction as a key strength: as a summer job in 2017, he had a hand in constructing the world’s largest festival tent at music festivals in Denmark, Finland and the UK. He’s a safe pair of hands indeed.

Wheatsheaves. Carved sandstone. Created for Longniddry Village, 2024.

But of course, the sculptures and carvings to which Jack now devotes himself reveal much more than good technical ability. It is immediately apparent, looking at Jack’s stones, that they are also indebted to something higher and mightier. Perhaps the most notable fact of Jack’s creative life is that his love for material and the mastery of his handling are married to a sort of creative intelligence in a union which is remarkable for its closeness and harmony.

Jack’s creative intelligence must be, I think, immediately apparent to the people who meet him, but it’s a slippery thing to define. That inexplicable ingredient which makes an artist tick, the seed which grows into an inextinguishable creative spirit, is something much more mysterious than an uncanny ability to tell cobalt from cadmium. It might first rear its head as an impulse: a painter might recognise it in the persistent urge to make pictures, even as their classmates, one by one, put away the paints.

I doubt if Jack has ever felt the itch to rush to a stone as a painter might rush to the canvas in the swell of creative orgasm. What sets stone apart from paint in expressive potential is a basic practical distinction which suits Jack’s temperament perfectly. For him, the excitement of inspiration finds form in something much more considered and resolved than a quick oil sketch. His work is so resolved, indeed, that if the great American clergyman Henry Ward Beecher was right when he said that “an artist dips his brush in his own soul”, then I suspect what wells in Jack’s soul is cut with a measure of clear-eyed good sense, so that the magic shines out in an expression which is rare in its brilliant clarity.

Jack’s ideas and the spirit which fuels them find perfect expression in his medium of choice; his arsenal of technical skills let him carry off the feat with apparent ease. What occurs in his imagination appears to have been carried through a sort of cerebral code-breaking machine, so he conceives of his ideas as intelligible, fully-formed artworks ready to be articulated in the stone. The reality is that Jack works extremely hard to give physical form to his ideas, but his best works would appear to have been born without the struggle of physical creation. What he expresses in his stones does not appear to have been compromised by the demands of the stone itself. Nevertheless, Jack’s work retains a deep respect for the character of his material which reflects his calling as a true craftsman; his ability to summon something greater, I would suggest, is the mark of an artist.

The Sun. Sandstone. Longniddry Village, 2024. Pictured as a work in progress.

That mysterious creative intelligence stirred in Jack around the time he sat his A-levels at a Cambridgeshire secondary school. His time at school was not straightforward: at one point, his art teacher advised him not to take the subject any further, given his work was not at all expressive. But a strong History of Art department inspired a sudden realisation that art, and particularly sculpture, “seemed to be the nexus of so many nascent interests, not least because sculpture was physically and technically demanding”. He found he felt at home in the History of Art class as well as the construction site he’d known as an eleven-year-old. Jack had not actually enrolled in the class, but sitting in when he could, he was hooked. When he managed to join the department’s school trip to Paris, as he says, “my fate was sealed”.

The school’s small ceramics studio allowed Jack to become absorbed in modelling. He found that his enthusiasm for handling clay, not to mention a natural facility, was matched by his enthusiasm for the sculptors of the past, whose lessons provided a sense of discipline which he welcomed. When a teacher loaned him Édouard Lantéri’s Modelling and Sculpting the Human Figure, the famous manual first published in 1911, Jack was smitten. As he remembered: “that book opened up a whole new world for me. I remember working through some of the exercises, making fragments of limbs and heads and sections of ornament. I wasn’t sure what to do with them and ended up stacking them together in a chaotic pile that paid homage to Fuseli’s sketch, The Artist's Despair Before the Grandeur of Ancient Ruins. A foreshadowing of my time at art school perhaps!”

Jack moved to Scotland and enrolled at Edinburgh College of Art in 2013. It’s little wonder that ECA’s unique Fine Art course, which marries traditional studio practice with the academic study of History of Art, attracted him: certainly, it suited his by now well-developed taste for the practical alongside the intellectual. ECA’s impressive cast collection – “a rare survivor of mid-century iconoclasms” – was unsurprisingly the icing on the cake, and tapped into a love for the classical tradition which he hoped to express over the course of five years. When I asked about Jack’s time at ECA, he told me his art school career had been eye-opening and formative; it had also been excruciating. 

“Art school provided you with the freedom to pursue anything you wanted, but there was also a strong conceptual framework which bred constant questioning: “why?” For me, this induced a strange paralysis in which an appreciation of the infinite possibilities was matched only by the infinite number of reasons not to do any of it. I wanted to work my thoughts out through the process of making, but the workshops which had been my haven in school were jealously guarded by technicians, to whom one had to pay court in order to access. I wanted to work, but I was made to feel like an annoyance. You needed to come with a predetermined design and a cut list. This wasn’t an environment to work through making; it was anxiety-inducing. Technical training in sculpture amounted to casting an everyday object in bronze. I chose a romanesco cauliflower, but that’s as close to Rome as I felt I could go!”

“In this void of making, the History of Art side of the degree was important. The ghostly casts were both comforting cultural touchstones as well as a taunting presence, for they brought an inescapable “burden of history” right into the studio. What art school did give me, though, was the space to read, think, and make connections across time and form. It was like gathering threads I wasn’t quite ready to weave.”

Yet Jack is still rightly proud of his Degree Show, mounted at ECA in 2018. He told me he found himself at the end of “five years of theory and ruminating, but not much creation”. As such, his space was filled with objects which might have appeared visually rather disparate, but which were bound together by a braided thematic thread. One of his central ideas was “oscillations through time”, a theme focussing on forms which can lie dormant only to seep back into our world through the ages. In Jack’s Degree Show, medieval headgear finds its modern equivalent in the distinctive shape of a motorbike helmet, and old Edinburgh toll gates are echoed in full-scale replicas of the anti-terror barriers which have now replaced them on the Royal Mile.

Shellmet. Cast and panel beaten aluminium. 2018. Collection of the artist.

The visual rhymes continued: his gleaming, welded aluminium helmet also incorporated the strangely analogous form of a scallop shell, at once underlining the dizzying visual mix and also suggesting the interconnectedness of all the work on show. It all rings true, given Jack’s comment that “at the core of all of my work is a love of the cyclical metamorphic processes of life, be it geological, organic, cultural. Through my work I seek to draw allusions and parallels, in particular the relationship with our built environment as natural expressions of human entanglement with all of these processes.”

The centrepiece of Jack’s Degree Show was a pair of Gothic architectural pinnacles, cast in bonded sand. These huge constructions stretch back to his childhood – “one of the most distinct creative memories I have is of making sandcastles until my fingernails were raw”, he says – and also anticipate his current engagement in architectural stone-carving. As much as Jack revelled in the process of creation, his Sandcastles also reflect something much weightier. Even making sandcastles as a child, Jack says, “I loved the endless quantity of malleable material. I think even then I recognised the dynamic and attritional relationship with the sea. Sculpting castles to watch the sea reclaim them made for a miniature accelerated universe where time built up and eroded away mountains and castles in a day”.

Sandcastles. Bonded sand. 2018. Now destroyed. Pictured here with Shellmet in the Royal Scottish Academy, 2019.

Jack’s pair of pinnacles go a long way towards summing up his artistic aims at that time. He was out to create work which was well-made, visually arresting and conceptually substantive; he also wanted it to engage with people. As Jack said, “I set out to create a body of work that was stimulating in the broad contemporary art context I was immersed in. Equally, I was aiming to make a body of work that could appeal to those outside the fine art world for its craftsmanship while still being something my peers would respect for its concept. To this end I produced four short illustrated documents that explored the concepts of the work, the idea being that you could take it as it was or read on should you wish to parse the meaning from the curious array of objects presented”. Exhibited in ECA then the Royal Scottish Academy, Jack’s pinnacles show him “trying to figure out how to balance concept and craft; but determined to find a way to do both”.

Post-ECA, from the summer of 2019 onwards, Jack spent two years at the Marble Carving School at Laas in northernmost Italy. He had been seeking out the right place to provide him with the sort of solid, technical training in sculpture which had eluded him at ECA. Laas, he says, was the complete antithesis of ECA. That much was clear the moment Jack walked into the workshop, where he came across a marble version of the same Jean-Antoine Houdon écorché sculpture which haunted the Sculpture Court at ECA. In Edinburgh, this figure was a curiosity for students; in Laas, the students were recreating it in stone.

Jack hadn’t carved a thing during his time at ECA, but he had an inkling of his latent sculptural ability, and somehow his paper degree was enough to let him jump straight into the fourth year at Laas. The School’s intensive timetable of classes introduced a technical dimension which appealed to his practical sense as well as his continuingly evolving enthusiasm for the art of the past. He took to it like a duck to water. “The process taught at Laas was straightforward”, he says: “copy the masters, use the same techniques, and learn through repetition. Through this simple but well-provisioned, technical education, carving examples of sublime Baroque sculpture becomes an eminently teachable process. Through copying progressively more complex models of masterful historic sculpture I quickly developed a solid understanding of working stone, and a confidence that I had lacked before.”

Cast Study After Praxiteles. Lasa marble. 2019. Collection of the artist. Pictured here with a plaster cast (Jack’s version to the foreground).

“Laas was strangely lost in its relationship to art, which is understandable, as art left academic marble carving behind a century ago. Laas was teaching the art of marble carving as a craft vocation but it had integrated some partially-digested notions of contemporary art education into its curriculum, which created unease and confusion. In this respect I was thankful for my time at ECA for it gave me a hard-won perspective on art that allowed me to place Laas as something so alien to contemporary practice that I didn’t seek to bring the two together directly in my nascent learning. If ECA taught me to think, Laas taught me to make.”

Jack’s time in Laas, intense and immersive, and perhaps further intensified by Italy’s stringent lockdowns, created the conditions which allowed him to carve a bust with serious intent. Beginning in 2020, over the course of three years and over 300 hours, he carved the head of his friend Sam from a single block of Lasa marble. The result is a fantastic likeness, taking in the quirks of the sitter’s physiognomy, articulating them with sympathy and expressing them with such gracefulness and genuine beauty that the whole appears strikingly classical. The astonishing articulation of individual curls in the subject’s thick, tousled hair shows Jack’s enthusiasm for a lost artistic world. Jack summed up his head in saying “the bust of Sam rekindled my love and understanding of carving as an art, but it was also a statement of ability and intent”.

A head modelled in clay followed. Jack’s breathtaking, naturalistic depiction of a life model called John sits comfortably within a long academic tradition; and indeed, it looks strikingly out of place in today’s broad contemporary art context. Picking out the subject’s features with great sensitivity - the curling ears, the veiny temples – Jack’s head of John is a wonderfully observed depiction of a presence which might have been arrested in a moment’s glance, so fabulously naturalistic is the result.

Head of Sam. Lasa marble. 2020-3. Collection of the artist.

Head of John. Patinated plaster cast. 2023. Collection of the artist.

Jack modelled the head in clay, cast it in plaster and painted it very convincingly to appear like bronze. As a convincing “bronze”, it assumed an almost classical dignity. But in the darkness of the mock-bronze patina, something of the form was lost: it became slightly dead. Jack ultimately resolved to paint the cast with a greyish, “half-lead, half-bronze” finish, and in doing so managed to preserve something of its liveliness. Indeed, his patination managed to save the bust from what he called “the purgatory of plaster”, that state between the initial clay model and the final bronze, which has traditionally been regarded as the end result. The all-important process of patination might be, as Jack says, the “sculptural equivalent of mortuary cosmetics”.

Head of John, pictured with “bronze” patina.

Jack’s reflections on the values of classical art, particularly the importance of beauty, have carried supreme substance into works which also stand up as exercises in technique and skill. Jack’s 2019 model Youth with Fish was set as a personal challenge as well as a meditation on beauty; a confident statement of his learning. Some of the success of the work might also be indebted to a further ingredient. As Jack told me, his Degree Show touched on threads which resurface in his later work, and the visual punning which raises a smile in his “shellmet” is there in Youth with Fish too. Jack’s sense of humour is rarely as piercing as in his Degree Show, in which he exhibited a fibreglass codpiece punctured by a hail of arrows, but his oeuvre is shot through with a strain of humour which, cleverly and carefully deployed, gives certain works a special currency. Youth with Fish, in its quiet dignity, is clearly a sincere response to the classical tradition, but it might also summon an image known to many twenty-first century romantics, out to find love on the dating apps: the notorious image of a young twenty-something, posing on a fishing trip and holding up a catch with a sort of beastly, tone-deaf pride. This youth-with-fish is easy to ridicule. By appealing to such modern sensibilities with a nudge and a wink, Jack has found a novel means of further underlining the essential dignity of the classical art he loves.

Youth with Fish. Painted clay. 2022. Collection of the artist.

In 2018, Jack was first approached with news of a project which would come to mark a serious shift in his practice. By the time he was approached to develop a large series of artworks for an intriguing new housing development just outside Edinburgh, he was feeling the desire to devote greater energy to the “craft” component of his creative life, for all of his continuing love for something intellectually rich and conceptually deep. He was out to sharpen his skills and marry his commitment to beauty with an emphasis on functionality.

Perhaps a spike in his ever-growing passion for architecture, too, made the timing of the commission feel like fate. As Jack told me, “I place an almost spiritual importance on architecture. How we build with the materials of the earth is the nexus of nature, geology, and human cultural life. The Sandcastles from my Degree Show reflect that idea. I think of a Gothic cathedral as a seashell – the crystallisation of the social organism into an enduring form. The social body that built those cathedrals is long gone, but their stone shells remain, much like shells left behind by a mollusc on a beach after the tide has gone out.”

Jack spoke to me in depth about the large-scale commission which has seen him hone his skills to produce a dizzyingly wide range of technically astounding pieces. It’s clear he is currently engaged in a central moment in his creative career. For all that these recent stones satisfy something of the new focus in Jack’s practice – a focus on “craft” – they remain true to his ideas and ideals, particularly in the way they seek to engage an audience; just as his Sandcastles sought to engage an audience. For Jack, even now, concept remains married to craft. And the exceptional artistry of his work – for want of a term which adequately reflects that mysterious force – suggests something higher and mightier.

“Whilst still studying at ECA, I attended the Kings Foundation Summer School at Dumfries House, which focussed on traditional craft. There, I met Ed Taylor, one of the architects involved in the urban planning of a new, novel housing development which had recently gained planning consent at a site just outside Edinburgh. Due to my proximity and passion, Ed approached me to collaborate on an artwork programme.

“At the risk of sounding like a developer’s brochure, Longniddry South is a housing development in East Lothian, centred on a redeveloped eighteenth-century farm steading which has now been transformed into shops and various other amenities. From this nucleus, the new village radiates out in a picturesque plan of various housing types that echoes the historical growth of a Scottish village. Longniddry South includes everything from eighteenth-century cottages to Arts and Crafts villas. They’re available for sale, but many are designated as social housing.

“Rather than a single large artwork, Ed imagined a series of architecturally-integrated sculptures peppering the site, creating the sort of charm that gives life to an organically-developing place. Currently there are around fifty details I’ve designed and made throughout the site, ranging from Art Deco-inspired heraldic shields, scrolled window surrounds, scallop shell swift habitats, vernacular overdoor sculpture, ornamental date stones, wheat sheaves, and cherub corbels integrated into plaques and window sills.

Cherub corbel. Painted concrete and carved stone. Longniddry, 2024.

“In many ways this commission relates strongly to my other work, since Longniddry South is a place with a complex relationship to time; the conceit of the development, which is of course a modern construction, is that it is attempting to reflect a centuries-long narrative of settlement. The traditional design and constructed chronology of the development opens a window to an expansive sculptural language, and I have the opportunity to draw from it and adapt it in a way that is incredibly freeing. Like an actor who slips into a costume for a role, I’m speaking authentically with my own voice through my work, but the sculptural vernacular I use allows me to project my voice louder and more poetically than if it were my own autobiography, so to speak.

Date stone. Carved sandstone. Longniddry, 2025.

“My own thoughts are there within the relative simplicity of many of the sculptures. The wheatsheaves, for example, carved to decorate the gables of the former grain store at the centre of the site, reflect this. Somewhat appropriately, the store is being converted into a local grocery shop for the housing development that is coalescing around the former farm.

“The idea of a wheatsheaf is simple enough, but the time spent carving allows one to dwell on what lies behind the work. East Lothian features wheatsheaves on its coat of arms. It’s known as “the bread basket of Scotland”. The area is also seeing a lot of new building work on good arable land as the metropolitan area of Edinburgh spreads; a cause of some tension in East Lothian. Given this context, perhaps placing a carving that speaks of a former purpose is a bit perverse. A mounted stag’s head comes to mind.

“However, while I was working, I had a vague recollection of a quote running around my head, which posited that the reason we carve – or carved – vegetal ornament into our buildings was as an offering or memorial of the space we took up and built on. It’s a fascinating idea. I'm not entirely sure, but I have a half-remembered idea of the quote:

‘When men build, they destroy; and it is the duty of the builder to replace with beauty what he has taken from the earth, and to remind us of what was there.’”

Wheatsheaf installed in Longniddry.

The wheatsheaves are fascinating examples which show how an emphasis on craft has vitalised Jack’s work. These are immediately beautiful objects which attract admiration readily at the site for which they were specifically created. They are not intended to be presented on a plinth or guarded preciously as works of fine art: always on full view, exposed to all elements, they serve a utilitarian purpose as objects created for the delight of the residents. Jack’s hope is that they are seamlessly subsumed into the spirit of the place. It would appear to be the desire of a craftsman, not necessarily the work of an artist; as with other works, his wheatsheaves remain unsigned.

Jack’s feet remain very much on the ground, but the weight behind his wheatsheaves is enough to demonstrate that his strong intellectual and indeed artistic sensibility continues to delve deep into an image, and imbues that image with a compelling conceptual dimension. It reflects his seriousness as a creator with an eye on the higher and mightier. The exceptional artistry of his work at Longniddry reflects that same artistic spirit. Carvings like his cherubic image of the sun, in which the subtle texture of the fine marks left by his chisel is brilliantly highlighted by the gilding, do more than complement the deservedly high profile of the award-winning housing development. I would like to suggest Jack’s carving of the sun alone should far outshine the seductiveness of the integrated kitchen appliances which are promised in the developer’s brochure.

The Sun. Pictured completed, painted and gilded.

I have a strong sense that Jack is proud of his work at Longniddry. It’s clear this project appeals closely to his keenly-felt sense of creative ambition and seemingly insatiable desire to further sharpen the technical skills and intellectual rigour which have carried him so far. Jack has only three sculptures still to produce, which he says will stand up as some of the most ambitious works to be included in the commission: larger in scale and more closely integrated with the architecture. As he says, “these will be the culmination of the commission and indeed my own development”. He’s excited to make a start, even at the end.

Jack is extremely grateful for the opportunity to produce such a body of public work in such a unique context. As he completes the project, which has figured so centrally in his working life over the past years, and has dominated his creative path, he is right to look forward with a sense of ambition. “I’d love to tackle an even more expansive project”, he says. 

I imagine The Jack Handscombe Sculpture Park. If it was ever to come into fruition, the craftsman in him might welcome the challenge, while shying away from the sight of his name in lights. The artist in him might be excited by another chance to oil the cerebral wheels, and marry such sensitivity with the strong skills cultivated by craft. The Jack Handscombe Sculpture Park might be a long way off yet; or he might have made it already.

Douglas Erskine

Acknowledgements

With sincere thanks to Jack Handscombe.

Photographs of Jack by Hannah Gardner Seavey. All other images courtesy of the artist.

Jack carving Head of Sam, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, 2023. Photograph by Hannah Gardner Seavey.