Anthony’s Recent Work

Recent carvings in oak

The Grotto Carvings

Anthony’s thoughts on the grotto carvings

“For 20 years from the mid 1980’s into the 2000’s I worked for Ray Coggins Interiors, a company based in Westbury, Wiltshire. Making bespoke interiors mainly catering for an American and European market and they also sold large original architectural fittings and antiques.

These interiors were often in an English classical 18th century style or in the later Victorian gothic, and were designed by Ray Coggins who had an astute eye for the architectural language of the 18th and 19th century.

These interiors also combined original 18th century architectural fittings reclaimed from buildings due to be demolished, including the fire places or chimney pieces, door and window surrounds, and miles of original cornice and other mouldings. My contribution was carving in the same style anything to compliment or complete the design, while the joiners made and put together everything under Ray’s supervision. Later when the original interior fittings became hard to obtain, the designs were made entirely from scratch taking many months to complete.

Throughout this time, I learnt much about the carving practices of the 18th century over these 20 years and am grateful for the experience.

During this time, I was also getting on with my own work, some of which is included here.

In 2019 while volunteering for the local National Trust in Stackpole, I was approached to make and carve a bench. Having not done anything like this for many years and also not being a joiner, I felt it best to make a proto type bench to resolve any issues.

The bench was made entirely from green oak which presented many challenges, including the seat and back, which made from single pieces of oak that continued to twist and warp for over a year, which made the construction tricky.

I went completely over the top with the carving, and when the NT visited the workshop, they wanted a much simpler design for their bench which I did, their bench is located in Lodge Park woods, Stackpole.

Having made the bench, it was too ornate to be left out of doors where it would start to rot sooner or later. My son Lewis converted a small shed for it from an existing wood store. 

Later I obtained a large quantity of twisted trunks of oak from Arwen’s saw mill at LLandarog for a large construction I was making in the garden, there were many pieces of the green oak left over. These were used to create the carvings for the grotto. The carvings were started in November 2021 and continue to today, although it’s not about how quickly or slowly something is carved, it takes roughly a day to carve 5 inches of a length of the stalactites that stretch across the room in several places and weeks to carve the free standing and large fossil / rock plaques.

As the Grotto carvings developed, it was necessary to enlarge the shed to accommodate them, the building has been extended 4 times and a pitched roof replaced the slanting one and later a lantern was made to display and illuminate more carvings.

Although there was no plan from the beginning to make such a room, on such a scale, I have enjoyed very much the whole process and journey. 

This is the first carved interior I have made since leaving Ray Coggins Interiors, 15 years ago and thinking about these previous perhaps rather formal interiors that were inevitably ‘exclusive’ and the feeling generated when you walk through an eight feet highly carved doorway into a grandly proportioned room is one of entitlement and self-aggrandisement which may seem slightly alien in today’s climate of social equality.

Wishing to carve an interior space where any visitor simply would like to comfortably remain and ‘be’ in, and view the garden from was the only idea. A carver described her experience of the room as magical.

In the previous carved interiors, there was a uniformity in the design, proportions and style especially in the necessary repetitive nature of the carved mouldings.

The carvings for the grotto worked best by being different to each other, and work independently as sculptural motifs in their own right..

Although an artist or interior designer may wish to ‘create’ a certain atmosphere of feeling from their work or interior, perhaps similar to the planted areas within a garden, the atmosphere in a work simply ‘flows’ from it.”