Sculpture for me is a means of giving form to my personal investigation of a core philosophical question: What is this enigma that we call life?
All living matter responds to external stimuli and internalises these external forces, transforming itself through such interactions, and endlessly manifesting ‘a state of suspended tension between being and non-being, in which both being and non-being are unreal and only their incessant interaction, their becoming, is real’, as Austrian philosopher, Ernest Fischer proposes.
By carving
directly by hand in wood, without making use of any preliminary plans or
drawings, my work strives to capture a moment in time of this ephemeral flow of
life, in an attempt to give concrete form to this process of becoming. By
giving a tangible form to such a constant metamorphosis/transformation, I
strive to access the essential and enigmatic element or energy that exists in
all things, but that remains elusive and unseen and that can only ever be
evoked.
For
this reason I often work with discarded pieces of wood, everything from old
fence posts to sections of door frames or beams salvaged from skips, attempting
to uncover the aesthetic potential and inherent energy in that which is often
overlooked and considered mundane and useless in order to give a meaning to
that which is apparently meaningless. Each finished piece acts as a silent
testament to the physical process involved in its own creation, the
transformation from discarded / useless cast off to an object worthy of
attention and contemplation. In this way
I attempt to challenge our sometimes fixed and preconceived perceptions, to
allow a space for the viewer to re-imagine and to see things in a new light, as
this quote from T.S. Eliot succinctly expresses.
We shall not cease
from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time
Four Quartets: Little Gidding (1942)
T.S. Eliot
Sculpture as a means of giving form to the
"sacred" serves the dual role of being both a concrete illustration
of the idea of the “sacred” and also an intermediate object of
contemplation/meditation that allows us access to the “sacred”. My work addresses the fact that we can never confront directly that
which lies beyond the realm of our senses, but can only give a form to it which
always acts as a mask.
My
current series Persona – the term
itself, carrying within it the original Latin meaning, mask – consists of bronze
casts of the pieces from my previous series Masks,
in which each piece, carved by hand in wood was originally intended to be an
abstract mask. It was my original intention to exhibit this series in a group
as wall mounted pieces. But, through the spontaneous nature of my working
methods, I found that as I developed this series they had moved further away
from my original conception and took on a new dimension, each piece becoming
more three dimensional and free standing than the flatter wall mounted pieces I
had first envisaged.
If it
is true that we can never confront directly that which lies beyond any mask or
persona, but can only imagine what might be there, my sculpture, as objects of
meditation attempt to access such a mysterious enigma opening it up for
contemplation and reflection. My work thus, has a dual and contradictory nature,
acting as both a conduit and an impediment to the unknown, revealing and
masking simultaneously.
