Plurality

The solitary, labour intensive sculpture making process, allows me time to think. While I repeat routine tasks, my mind travels to familiar and unfamiliar places. I grasp at the flow of consciousness, writing down fleeting thoughts, hammering the text into wood or bronze. My thought process becomes a meditative texture, not always complete, deciphered or understood.

Like a butcher, processing a carcass, hacking away on a butcher’s block, I repeatedly dissect and arrange my feelings in a series of Sentimental Blocks. Abuse, power, acceptance, victimisation all control my position, impaired by the impractical surfaces I work on. Casting two of the legs in bronze, an illusion, a game to play, an imperfection, emphasising the decision making. The Sisyphean act of living, making art, searching for unblemished shape, are meaningful in its absence of reason. Rolling the ball for the rest of time.

A Kudu head, found, horns entangled in a snare. The rest of the body gone, taken. Bushmeat, a way to survive in a disappearing world. While making a mould of the jawbone, I see all sides of the dilemmas and differing values, and I find no easy way to keep this world together.

Trying to share a visual language verbally, I use existing moulds to demonstrate the Lost Wax process to university art students. The criteria for choosing a mould, arbitrary, one silicone rubber and one plaster of Paris. It happened to be an icosahedron, from a commission, and a rhino, made for a different exhibition. The playful outcome, a rhino carrying its load. Barely able to exist under the unbearable lightness of being.

How will I make sense of today’s world? Absurd politics and war, makes me meaninglessly laminate wood off-cuts. Let countless wooden shapes guide me towards ideas, unfolding. Vessels to transport me to other worlds. Physical objects changing into different possibilities. A little modification, aligning reality with a plethora of ideas. Each wooden block a little sculpture on its own. Again, I borrow shapes and lines from the Long-crested Eagle, visible outside my workshop window. The image in my mind’s eye slowly transforming to the object in my hands. In the studio I escape into a world where my world doesn’t exist.