The article describes a visit to "Back to the Cave: The Full Spectrum," an exhibition of around 70 sculptures by contemporary artists including Damien Hirst, Antony Gormley, Sarah Lucas, and Maggi Hambling, held in the ancient Clearwell Caves in the Forest of Dean, England. The show was organized by Rungwe Kingdon and Claude Koenig of Pangolin Editions, a sculpture foundry that fabricated many of the works, and required significant ingenuity to install large, heavy pieces in the deep, dark, damp cave system.
This matters because the exhibition transforms a historic site—mined for iron ore and ochre for millennia and linked to Michelangelo's pigments—into a dramatic, site-responsive art experience. It highlights the crucial but often invisible role of fabricators like Pangolin Editions in enabling major artists' visions, while demonstrating how unconventional settings can radically alter the perception and impact of sculpture, as seen in the artists' own reactions to their works in the caves.