Peter Briggs was born in Gillingham in 1950. He trained at the Hornsey College of Art from 1963 to 1973, but despite his British heritage, the sculptor is best known for his work in France, where he settled in 1973. There, he transitioned from student to teacher, teaching at the École nationale des beaux-arts de Dijon, then that of Rennes. The artist’s deliberate tendency to distance himself from evolving trends lends him an unusual place in the contemporary art scene, given the culture he stems from and the one he chose to adopt.
In 1976, Briggs organised a symposium on sculpture with the help of Jean-Marc Poinsot. Jean Clareboudt and Barry Flanagan (for whom Briggs worked as an assistant) were among those invited. The latter’s influence is still perceptible in flashes, especially in the lumpy, accumulative aspect of much of his linear sculpture. Where Flanagan stuck with animal motifs (almost exclusively the rabbit), Briggs returned to more organic and symbolic forms, such as the root, the chrysalis, the kernel, the shell.
Thematically, Briggs conceives his corpus in cycles which are left deliberately open-ended in order to be able to come back to them, sometimes years or decades later. The processes, techniques and forms with which Briggs experiments are nods to the history of the sculptural medium, in a bid to contextualise the works and their display. Unconstrained by the need to follow current trends, Briggs is free to navigate epochs and styles, creating, as he puts it, ‘anachronistic indexes where contemporary, recreations, reproduced or historical elements are organised as to give space a specific meaning’.
Naturally, temporality plays a large role in Briggs’ corpus, which could be described as an investigation of the past/present dialectic. The sculptor describes his medium as a point of view or a historical positioning, allowing for a specific perspective on the modern and contemporary.
Briggs lives and works between Delhi (where he set up a studio in 2002 in search of new techniques) and Tours, where he has taught sculpture at the École supérieure des beaux-arts since 1983.
