I started out as an illustrator, doing cartoons in textbooks and things like that, probably
twelve years ago I think. I had 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 had had a few little shows and I'd always been making work in the background
like while I was working in film I kept 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
seemed 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, she had a beautiful
face and the babies are generally from my own kids even though I've got photos of them
and their babies. 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 madam to swords
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 it a little bit more surreal. I know some
of the sculptures like people have had an emotional like 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 like 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 that's sort of a bit more abstract. So I think that's probably one of the things
that makes art very challenging because there's no instruction manual.
