The Makers Tale.
Sometimes when I feel like making a piece of sculpture I just want to create Something! Manifest It just by doing it. So sometimes something begins through another absurd moment; looking at a piece of steel tube; the sight of some bolt-croppers out of the corner of my eye and wow, a week or so later of hard focus you have an iconic thing that you have to carry around like Sysiphus. And then More, as with the crown jewels.
I was looking for familiar objects with a variety of dynamic lines that could go together; forms that would work together to make one monumental group.
The Tools refer to the rhyming slang Crown Jewels but also refer to the notion that in so called ‘primitive’ societies tools form a family and as such through the intervention of a maker are involved in a creation process that produces offspring/magical objects.
The Hammer was modelled on a cross-peen hammer that belonged to my grandfather, a dentist from Kent. The original is still part of my tool-kit. In the sculpture it is positioned at a permanent lean, falling; in contrast to the Bolt-Croppers that stretch out towards the sky inadvertently striking a V for Victory or perhaps a V for F. Together they can make an X.
The most passive element in the Crown Jewels is the Drift; lying horizontally it reminds me of a figure on its sarcophagus in a cathedral or tomb. It was first exhibited at the Chelmsford Cathedral Festival and was placed upon the first Bishops grave until a member of the public objected.
It is about reaching up, falling and sleeping.