Having grown up in an artistically eclectic household, I have always held a reverence for the artisans of old. Fulfilling the genres of both art and craft with skill and humour, the medieval cathedral carvers set me on my artistic journey. Other more modern influences such as Zadkine, Brancusi, Moore and Frink, join forces with Calder and Picasso to add experimental thought and playful practice to my designs.
Training at the RA affiliated City and Guilds of London Art School and Florence I nurtured my love of learning the skill of carving. Now I am free to simply discover what the materials of my trade offer me.
Sculpture combines a glorious mixture of science, play and the search for form. Since my early years I’ve loved trees and nature, boulders shaped by rivers, soil that can be red, white, green or brown. I love mixing plaster, crushing pigments, laying gold. Using different mediums keeps my work refreshing especially as each material brings its own design interpretation and method of working. Stone for me demands cool, clear lines; wood can be almost anything imaginable from abstract minimalism to complex detail, from large chainsawn pieces to small intricate designs. Scrap metal is suggestive, playful, often powerful in abstraction and sheet metal introduces an interesting dimension to garden sculpture. Ceramic clay, which I normally use only for maquettes/studies, has a wonderful random quality which I like to explore. Random outcomes are also a large part of printmaking, which I find is a great way to explore ideas that are not yet fully formed.
Everything I do is underpinned by life-drawing, which I consider to be artistic yoga – a way of exercising hand/eye coordination, and offers the possibility of finding the essence of line and form whilst being in the beautifulquiet space of the moment of now.
