Origins in the St Ives Modernist Movement

Born in St Ives in 1941, Telfer Stokes is the son of Margaret Mellis and Adrian Stokes, and as a child grew up at the centre of the avant-garde Modernist Movement centred around St Ives. He graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art and continued his studies at the Brooklyn Museum Art School in New York where he was introduced to Barnett Newman. He later taught at Reading Art School and Bath Academy, and founded the imprint Weproductions publishing artist's books. Over the last twenty years Telfer has been based in Suffolk and has redirected his focus to sculpture, using marine and industrial scrap metal.

On the Construction of Sculpture: Space, Pattern, and Colour

"In the construction of a piece, the spacing could be compared to the pauses or the fermatas in music. The repeated pattern returning continuously with different emphasis might be the melody. I keep the colour to both combine and distinguish the separate parts. I want to catch the eye with this combination and the angularity of a bit of metal. What finally emerges is something somewhere between a sculpture and a painting that goes on the wall and which relates very strongly to an architectural setting."

Telfer Stokes, April 2023