Sculpture

For various reasons and mainly for simplicity I have organised the sculptures by title collecting images of them in different locations and from different exhibitions and putting them together without mentioning the location and date. Perhaps this will follow. Too many words anyway!
Sculpture for me began at Corsham, (Bath Academy of Art), where I started to work in steel. The final show in 1978 was made during the last couple of terms after a forge was installed; this kind of alchemical blacksmithing stayed with me for around fifteen years until I eventually rejected the forge in favour of sheet steel so I could work on bigger and bolder statements free of the irritating label of blacksmith artist. Working at the Skinningrove steel rolling mill in 1990 when I made the sculptures for Huntcliff was an amazing peak for me using the forge to make sculpture. After that the forge still featured as a means of making things but it seemed to become increasingly limited as a method of making sculpture. Too much hammering and no volume mainly bones. In the bigger objects made since 1998 I found methods of making sculptures with clarity turning sheet steel into illusions of everyday objects. There was a time when faced with an exhibition I would make a new piece either in response to the space or as a compliment to the work I already had in my collection. Recent work in the public realm has taken shape in wood and bronze and now thirty two years after leaving art school I am in the middle of another change. Moving towards figurative experiments; bronze casting and printmaking to go with some of the more interesting source material that inspired some of the public artworks; and sculptures. I now want to create a completely new body of work that will lead to further creative adventures, experiments and exhibitions.

In the following pages I have tried to bring together as many strands of thought as I can remember that associates with each piece. This ’makers view’ is intended to reflect the ideas, intentions and sources material of the sculptures. I was irritated by the way subjects were disconnected at school so this is an attempt at a holistic series of connections and cross references written for the www.
Since around 2005 I have made virtually no new sculpture at all; partly because I have been absorbed by some major public art commissions, shed building and the demands of growing children. This cataloguing and analysis of my work is an exciting exercise in remembering ideas and coming to some conclusions about the value of the collection of work as a whole and what if anything I can take forward into New Work.
Feb 2010