IF you are visiting Salisbury Cathedral, be careful not to bump into Sean Henry’s extraordinary sculpted figures.

If you remember the artist’s giant resting figure on a plinth, Catafalque, which was outside the West Front of the cathedral as part of the Liminality exhibition in the autumn, you will already know how engaging these lifelike figures are.

Henry’s artwork celebrates the fragile individuality of anonymous men and women. The figures in his exhibition are cast in bronze or ceramic and painted either in oil or weather paint. Like all Henry’s work, they are not lifesize but either larger or smaller than life.

Canon Treasurer Mark Bonney, who is chairman of the cathedral’s exhibitions committee, said: “Conflux means a bringing together and this exhibition unites Sean’s contemporary secular sculpture with our existing medieval, classical sculptures.

The cathedral’s sacred sculptures celebrate historically important men and women and the glories of faith while Sean’s sculptures depict the humanity of contemporary secular man and pay homage to the anonymous and unknown.”

Henry, who now lives and works near Salisbury after moving to the city from London, has public art in other high profile places.

His work, Couple, was the UK’s first permanent offshore sculpture. Two figures, 13 metres high stand on a steel structure located 300 metres off the coast at Newbiggin by the Sea in Northumberland, staring out to the North Sea.

Complementing the sculptures is an exhibition of the artist’s drawings at Sarum College.

Incidentally, Catafalque is now in residence in a 125-acre botanical garden and sculpture park in Michigan.

* Sean Henry’s sculptures can be seen in the cathedral until October 31.

Look out for an interview with Henry in September’s edition of Wiltshire Society magazine.