YOU’VE probably never thought much about the weight of an angel, but for Ed Elliott it’s a matter of some importance. Because his angel tips the scales at more than 30 stone and at that size it’s not going to fly.

Ed’s cold cast bronze sculpture Greer, Guardian Angel also has a wing span of around 10ft and this impressive piece of art work won the Sculpture of the Year 2020 Award at the Cotswold Sculpture Park near Cirencester.

The angel then had to be dismantled into three manageable sections to travel to the renowned Royal Horticultural Society  Rosemoor Winter Sculpture Exhibition in Devon, where it was lit in the evening for the venue’s spectacular GLOW Illuminations event until Christmas.

It’s a real feather in the cap for the 35-year-old from Great Malvern who has had his work spotted by TV celebrity Davina McCall and shared online with her 1.2 million followers.

In fact without much fuss, this former Chase High School student, who specialises in wood and bronze and works from “an ever-growing but still humble studio”, has been creating highly innovative and emotive work which is collected across the world.

With public pieces in six counties, his ambitious larger-scale figurative sculptures in wood, have led him to become one of the nation’s leading sculptors in this medium.

Ed’s workshop lies in the shadow of the Malvern Hills, which were his early playground. “I’ve had an elemental fascination with wood since exploring the Malvern Hills as a child,” he said, “and I’ve always been creative.

“I was I was blessed with a creative family. My mother is a musician, a designer and a teacher, my father is a writer and musical,  and my older brother George is a musician and now a writer too. Then while studying sculpture at University, I realised my artist uncle (dad’s brother), who lives in New Zealand, also specialises in sculpture.”

He studied for his foundation diploma in art at the University of Gloucestershire in Cheltenham, followed by a BA(Hons) in fine art: sculpture at the Cardiff School of Art & Design. Then followed further studies in New Zealand. The foundation of the “Angel series” was started on his first commission, for a memorial.

Ed added: “This resulted in me creating more than 250 drawings focusing on anatomy, at first a bird’s wings and how they work, then human anatomy and then how that could work together. I then found I had created a recognisable character in these drawings, something I later titled ‘Greer’ which is a Celtic/Gaelic word meaning ‘Watchful’ or ‘Guardian’. This started the ball rolling on a series of work that has developed over 10 years. 

“Greer, Guardian Angel’ took six to eight weeks to sculpt, then a similar time to mould and cast. So the timescale for a large scale piece of work is usually around six months. I often design pieces with a specific site in mind, working closely with clients. 

“This piece was a private commission and limited edition of five, designed to sit within an 11ft circular space in the client’s garden.”

Others in the Greer, Guardian Angel series have gone as far afield as Scotland, America and Western Australia, but this is by no means the limit of Ed Elliott’s ambitions.

“I would eventually like to go much bigger,” he said. “My aspirations are for a very large public piece someday.” On a wing and a prayer possibly?