Bill Woodrow

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Pond, by Bill Woodrow, Luxembourg museum of modern art, 2006

Bill Woodrow (born 1948) is a British sculptor.

Woodrow was one of a number of British sculptors to emerge in the late 1970s, the others including Richard Deacon and Tony Cragg.

Woodrow's early work was made from materials found in dumps, used car lots and scrap yards, partially embedded in plaster and appearing as if they had been excavated. He went on to use large consumer goods, such as refrigerators and cars, cutting the sheet metal and allowing the original structure to remain identifiable, with the cut-out attached as if by an umbilical cord to the mother form. Collecting all manner of things, altering them and giving them a new context, allowed Bill Woodrow an element of narrative in his work.

When in the 1990s he began to make work in bronze, the stories remained, for example in a seminal work, In Awe of the Pawnbroker 1994, in which the meaning of the pawnbroker's symbol is unravelled. This sculpture has a number of elements that add up to what is virtually an installation. One of three artists selected to make a sculpture for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, Woodrow chose to explore a recurring theme in his work, the destruction of our planet and the insistent strength of nature over man.