I started out as an illustrator, doing cartoons in textbooks and things like that.
About 12 years ago, I think, I'd been working in film. I did a lot of creatures for movies.
And I got to a point where I decided that I'd much rather be making my own stuff and exhibiting it in a way that was sort of controllable, really.
And I had been exhibiting prior to that. I'd had a few little shows.
And I'd always been making work in the background.
Like, while I was working in film, I kept, you know, whenever I had some time off, I would go back to the studio and make a new sculpture of my own.
And went to what I really wanted to do, which was sculpting animals and puppets and things like that.
I mean, the process usually goes, there's an initial drawing, some sketches.
And then I'll go from there and do a marquette, like a small version of the final sculpture.
And then once that's all resolved and nice and clean and works, then I'll go into the full-size piece in clay.
But yeah, the initial drawing is, that's kind of where it all begins.
I think really, I used to try and make things very quickly, like in a month and a half or something like that.
But they seem now to take about the best part of three months, really. I think sometimes a simple sculpture that can seem really simple to make,
can wind up being really difficult.
Usually they're referenced from someone I know, or often it's like a combination of a few different people.
This one was a couple of different people. It was a friend of my mother's.
She really was very kind and my mother took some photos of her and I used that as reference, a beautiful face.
And the babies are generally from my own kids, I've got photos of them when they're babies.
But yeah, some of them are literally a combination of a whole bunch of different people, just like a made-up face.
But I think there's a lot of issues with it. It's a very controlled process.
So you have to kind of strangle it all the way through. And often that's not very free process.
You're still doing things in a very technical way, but you don't want to be sort of just making representative art like a Madame Tussauds thing.
You're trying to make something a little bit more interesting.
I think that's why I've always changed the scale a little bit and always been happy to kind of throw in some other elements like animals or make a little bit more surreal.
I know some of the sculptures, people have had an emotional, they'll see perhaps a family member or something like that in the work.
And so like with that Pieter is a good example. People would see it and see either a parent or a relative of theirs.
That would sort of affect their interpretation of the work, which was nice to see actually because I had my own angle on it.
At the moment I'm really enjoying sculpture because I feel like I've just gotten to a point where I've got the process very robust and it's very clean and efficient.
I use this because it's so robust and it's so heat resistant and there's no shrinkage at all, which means that it's not kind of giving itself off over time, it's very stable.
I think with my work I tend to include them and keep them the same.
With this particular work, having a baby and an older woman, it's really the same individual.
And so it's a nice way of kind of balancing it in a way and so it's not like a literal scene instead of a bit more abstract.
I think that's probably one of the things that makes art very challenging because there's no instruction manual.
Thank you.
