Figurative Sculpture

FIGURATIVE Sculptures

"Sculpture must, above all, be a thing of beauty; it must uplift the spirit and enhance its surroundings."

The human form is a fascinating subject for sculpture and one I have only recently focused on; I love the sense of movement and the ability to convey emotion. At first I just concentrated on the head with sculptures like Search for Enlightenment and Leaf Spirit. Then I moved onto the full human form and used ballet as my inspiration. The first stage is to create a maquette, which I do in a more traditional style, although with a contemporary and flowing base. However, for the life size sculptures such as Sylph and Firebird I wanted to create something with a more ethereal quality that had a delicacy which reflected the elegance of the ballerina as well as the beauty of the performance. 

Each of the life size pieces is unique and I fabricate them by welding up to 1500 bronze leaves together to creat the form. The delicate latticework created by the leaves adds to the ethereal quality of the piece and allows her to blend in with her surroundings. Creating a unique piece out of bronze leaves allowed me to convey those qualities and these are some of the most satisfying sculptures I have produced. 

I started the piece by spending some time working on poses with Ksenia Ovsyanick, the principal ballerina with the Staatsballett, Berlin. With Sylph I thought I had decided on a pose and then at the end of the day we played the music from Saint-Saëns’s cello solo, Le Cygne, which Michel Foline had used as the musical basis to create the solo ballet performance The Dying Swan for Anna Pavlova. As the ballerina danced the Dying Swan I was mesmerised by the elegance and grace and then I saw the pose I wanted to use.
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