Giant Bronze Wonder

A GIFT

I have decided to give my Giant Bronze Wonder away.

↓
A gift

Not because I have
stopped believing in it.

Quite the opposite.

I have lived with this form for a very long time. I discovered it, drew it, modelled it, engineered it and eventually made it monumental in bronze. I have watched it turn and change and remain somehow completely itself.

In the aftermath of seven years of work, collapse and recovery, and thanks to the kindness of several benefactors, I have retained ownership of a rare, one-off giant bronze piece measuring one cubic metre, weighing 67 kg, cast in bronze and finished in polished gold paint. I call it the Giant Bronze Wonder.

I have tried to understand it.

I have tried to explain it.

If I am truthful, it has also become an obsession.

And I don't want to own it anymore.

That feels important.

The Giant Bronze Wonder has been valued at more than £250,000. I could try to sell it. I could keep it as an asset. I could spend another decade attempting to prove its significance.

Instead, I would like to give the Giant Bronze Wonder away.

I would like to offer the Giant Bronze Wonder to the British Museum, as a gift, and ask them to become its next custodian.

WONDER IN SAINT ALDHELM’S CHAPEL, BESIDE THE RESTING PLACE OF KING ATHELSTAN — MALMESBURY ABBEY, WILTSHIRE
What is Wonder?

The magic of childhood wonder.

At its simplest, the Giant Bronze Wonder is an expression of the magic of childhood wonder through the eyes of an adult who never allowed himself to fall out of love with his imagination.

Children understand this instinctively.

A cardboard box can become a spaceship. A stick becomes a sword. A strange shape can contain an entire universe.

Then we grow up.

We learn what things are called. What they are worth. What they are for. What is sensible. What is possible.

Somewhere along the way, many of us stop looking.

I didn't.

I grew up, but my imagination came with me.

Wonder is what happened when I followed it through invention, engineering, mathematics, sculpture, failure, obsession and play.

It is evidence, perhaps, that an adult
is still allowed to imagine.

Heraclitus

By changing, it remains the same.

More than two thousand years ago, Heraclitus tried to put words around something he called the Logos: an underlying order in a world in which everything is continually changing.

He became known as the Obscure. Ancient stories associate him with withdrawal and melancholy, although history and legend have become thoroughly entangled around the man.

I understand something of the problem.

There is a danger in trying too hard to explain something that might be better experienced.

One of the ideas associated with Heraclitus has followed Wonder almost from the beginning:

By changing, it remains the same.

That is precisely what the sculpture appears to do.

Its surface continually moves. Its geometry transforms. Nothing seems fixed.

And yet the object remains unmistakably itself.

I have spent years wondering what that means.

Perhaps I don't need to know.

Wonder in Saint Aldhelm’s Chapel, Malmesbury
It was never entirely mine

A remarkable amount of goodwill has accumulated inside this object.

There is another reason that simply selling the Giant Bronze Wonder no longer feels right.

At a moment when its future was uncertain, Lady Georgia and Sir Nicholas Coleridge helped save it because they believed it possessed cultural value.

My late friend Cory is part of its story too.

So are the makers, engineers, friends, supporters, custodians and complete strangers who have helped Wonder continue its improbable journey.

Every one of them carried it a little further.

So although my name is attached to it, the Giant Bronze Wonder doesn't feel entirely mine anymore.

In a strange way, it has become a gift from all of us.

And perhaps that is what a legacy should be.

I don't want my legacy to be something I desperately held onto.

I would rather it were something I let go.

Gold and silver Giant Bronze Wonder sculptures together in the workshop
BROTHER AND SISTER.
GOLD AND SILVER.
Silver Sister Giant Bronze Wonder on mirrored plinth
SILVER SISTER
Letting go

Opening your hand.

There is an idea I have been trying to understand for much of my life.

Sometimes you have to release something into the world
before something new can arrive.

But the moment you do that expecting a reward,
you have turned the act into a transaction.

That isn't what I mean.

I mean opening your hand.

Letting something go into the universe without knowing what happens next.

No bargain.

No obligation.

No expectation of getting anything back.

Only the possibility that making space allows something
unimaginable to enter it.

Only wonder.

An offer to the British Museum

So this is my offer.

I would like to give the Giant Bronze Wonder to the British Museum.

I ask for no payment.

Its monetary value is substantial — more than £250,000 — but that isn't the value that particularly interests me anymore.

Its possibility is.

There is, however, one thing I would ask of its next custodian.

Give Wonder its moment.

Give it a special space.

Give it room to breathe and room to move.

And for at least one extraordinary day, place it before the public with the reverence we sometimes give to objects whose significance we do not yet completely understand.

Let children encounter it.

Let artists encounter it.

Let mathematicians, engineers, philosophers, tourists, dreamers and people who happened to walk through the wrong door encounter it.

Let someone having the best day of their life stand before it.

Let someone having the worst day of their life stand before it.

They don't need to know my story.

They don't need to understand the geometry.

They don't even need to know what it means.

They can simply look.

And wonder.

After that, I let it go.

Perhaps one day the Giant Bronze Wonder will become a legend.

Perhaps it won't.

That's rather the point.

I made Wonder.

A great many people helped it survive.

Now I would like to give the Giant Bronze Wonder away.

Not to disappear.
To belong.

GIANT BRONZE WONDER

Bronze.

Designed and developed in Britain.
Cast in Germany.
Polished gold finish from Ukraine.

Made with love against the odds.

One of one.


Offered as a gift to the British Museum
and to everyone who comes after us.


No transaction.

No expectation.

Only wonder.

Tom Lawton outside the British Museum
TOM LAWTON  photographed by his best friend SPILLERS
♪ The Day Brings

I LET IT GO.

Tom Lawton
Inventor · Artist

Experience Wonder