A Look Back At My Sculptural Work

I absolutely love making. Whatever it is, I absorb myself in it totally, so much so I feel like I almost become the object. Sculpture was something I loved to do for a while, but soon I ran out of space. So I had to make the painful decision to focus on painting purely for practical reasons. I love painting too of course, but a part of me still yearns to get my hands on some clay or wire or even just paper and glue, so I can create some otherworldly objects. Here I look back at some of my sculptural works and how they form part of my artistic journey.

Family phrenology head

This was one of the first fully realised sculptures I created as part of my final Art Foundation project, for which I was proud to receive a Distinction. I wanted to create a phrenology head but reference every aspect of my brain / mind / personality against where it might have come from, i.e., my mother, father or whether it was just innate. Of course now I can see it is a rather a deterministic take on a typically teenage contemplation of identity! I started the piece using clay based on photographs a friend took of me from every angle. Letting it air dry, I completed the piece with a lick of red acrylic paint to emphasis the sculptures exploration of blood ties.

Women of Steel

This was one of my most accomplished series of sculptures or installations, and also my last. Incidentally it doesn’t exist anymore because I simply didn’t have the space or means to preserve them. I was interested in the portraiture of women at the time and how often more difficult and controversial women are avoided in its subject matter. Read more about this series of artworks on my blog post here. The Women of Steel later went on to be featured in the book ‘The Art of Being Dangerous’.

The Sea and the Sky

Taking inspiration from Seurat’s Le Bec du Hoc, Grandcamp (1885) this was my chance to experiment with ceramics and carving stone. What is missing from the images is the foreground which I carved out of breeze block, a nice material to work with and I liked how it’s porosity conveyed the texture of the grassland and pointillism in a 3D way. In the end I felt the ceramic sculptures worked best on their own. These I intended to look as if you had cut those sections of the sea and sky right out of Seurat’s painting to reveal what lay behind.

Spiral

There was a period where I became preoccupied with the concept of the golden ratio and how it pervades every aspect of our being, from the minute to the gargantuan. I created many artworks drawing on this idea and this was one of them. I started with chicken wire, then built on the shape with plaster bandages, finishing with a layer of acrylic paint and varnish.

Branching form (in wire)

Another piece in wire, a material I frequently went back to because I loved it’s malleability but also it’s multi-dimensional qualities in terms of the beautiful shadows it casts and how it changes so much from every angle you look at it. Branching form in wire took an abstract painting I made based on everyday found objects and turned it into a 3D sculpture, added further layers of abstraction and distortion.