Story of a Sculpture
At exhibition the two most asked questions are how long it takes to make a piece, and where the ideas come from. Here’s one answer to those questions.
I was lucky enough to visit Iceland in April 2017. Photographs that I took there informed a number of sculptures - ice formations, crashing waves on a beach, the wonderful architecture in Reykjavik, the rocks around the tectonic fault at the old parliament, and this one. We were visiting one of the amazing waterfalls, Seljalandsfoss, and I clambered up a steep grassy slope to the side to better photograph the sea birds which were wheeling and diving around the edge of the cliff.
Dancing Gull, Iceland 2017
In my photography A Level teaching I often used to get students to explore the various ways of expressing movement in a single image - slow shutter speed for blur, fast to freeze motion, camera panning and multiple exposures. In the last method, the work of Victorian pioneer Eadweard Muybridge in using multiple exposures of a moving image is still relevant today. I had him in mind when I photographed these sea birds and put the images together in Photoshop.
Gull Flight, Iceland 2017
I had this image mulling around in my head as the basis for a sculpture, but I couldn’t resolve how to make the birds sit together as one coherent piece. Earlier in the year though, I had carved in pink Indian soapstone the imaginatively titled Two Fish. In the summer my dog, Pudding, and I were swimming in Llyn Dinas in Snowdonia. It was hot, and we had run a couple of miles to get to the lake, so a swim was perfect. As we headed out into the lake there were small flies buzzing above the surface. Ahead of us, suddenly, the water broke, and a trout leapt from the lake’s surface to take a fly from the air. She turned in the air like a high jumper, snapped at the fly and flopped back into the water. The connection was immediate, and Leaping Fish was born.
I knew the form of the piece, and I knew that back home I had just the stone. A big rough chunk of blue alabaster that had been sitting around for a year or more, waiting for inspiration to strike.
Alabaster cleaned up on one side and marked ready for carving. Note my lack of sketching ability and the key labelling of the fish 1F, 2F etc
It’s then a simple matter of chipping away all the bits that don’t look like fish. Alabaster is tough, and this blue alabaster is especially tough where the veins of blue are - I broke a tooth off my favourite chisel! First cuts were made with a saw, then scutch comb chisels, then flat bladed chisels, then rifflers and down to sandpaper.
I mounted the piece on a bit of salvaged kitchen worktop, a really fossiliferous bit of somebody’s fancy kitchen that otherwise would have ended up in landfill.
The finished piece is intended to represent five frozen moments in the jump of a single fish out of water. It was bought from exhibition by a pair of retired doctors from Tunbridge Wells. They’ve since bought more of my work, which is always pleasing.
The alabaster is very translucent, and clever placing of the work in the sun has made for some great photos. This is an inside piece - alabaster is water soluble so would be damaged were it to be left outside.
So that’s where the idea came from. The other question, how long it takes, is harder to answer. I bought the stone in 2015. I photographed the birds in 2017, and I finished the piece in December of 2019. I would guess - and it really is a guess - that the total time spent actually carving would be in the order of 50 hours. Some of these pieces are hard-earned, but I hope you agree that the visual and tactile reward is worth it.
