Laying Figure
Found Objects
200x100x100cm
My final piece on my foundation year at the Royal Drawing School: an assemblage sculpture using mainly industrial and mechanical parts. The piece was an experiment in using materiality to evoke the tension and discomfort associated with anxiety, with each object’s former use bringing meaning or metaphor to the body part it was repurposed to represent. I depicted the figure lying down, propped up on one arm, disrupting the usual comfort and relaxation associated with reclining figures, instead focusing on the awkwardness and angular position of the figure.
Big Toe
Found Objects
80x70x30cm
This assemblage sculpture reconfigures deteriorating and discarded scraps into a fleeting form that mimics the human foot. Drawing on Georges Bataille’s essay ‘Big Toe’ and the notion that the foot is a site of both disgust and obsession, the work embodies a paradox of attraction and repulsion—an uncanny structure destined to eventually dissolve back into the junk pile. Bataille used the foot as a metaphor for his theory of ‘baseness’, describing how the foot allows us to stand tall with our heads in the sky, sacrificing itself to remain in the mud. This elevation is echoed in the display of the piece, with this scrap object sitting proudly on a clean white plinth in a protective glass case, elevating what was once sitting in a pile of refuse.
Compound Artefact
Bronze and concrete
60x65x30cm
This sculpture was an exercise in expanding my idea of what collage could be. Instead of the usual process of combining two-dimensional images on a flat surface, I cut out three-dimensional imprints and combined them on a sculptural surface. I pushed found objects into a rolled-out slab of soft clay, creating negative indentations and then cast them in wax, producing positive reliefs, before collaging them onto a larger wax substrate. I trimmed excess wax around the objects to avoid empty areas and turned it over to add texture to the back by melting areas with hot metal and painting on molten wax with a brush. I used this wax object to cast a bronze using the lost wax process. The rectangular shape reminded me of a flag once it came out of the plaster, and so I gave it colour by patinating it, welded it onto a stick of bronze to act as a flag pole and planted it in a concrete block. The piece is an exploration of collaged textures and a sense of heaviness. It has an industrial and aged feel. The work occupies a similar area of exploration as my 2D work, as it experiments with layers, accumulation of disparate and alien objects and the fine line between flatness and depth.
