My terracottas are small in scale which might these days mitigate against them being considered a serious creative endeavour. Work understood as significant needs scale for presentation in the vast, white spaces constructed to display contemporary work for public viewing. But small scale work can hold its own intensity perhaps. The tactile sensibility of hand-manipulated material can more directly compress and embody hand, eye and mind activity in one comprehensive expression. For these pieces to ‘live’, the surface quality and structure acts as a permeable membrane upon which inner vitality pushes and pulls. This must function cohesively in the round for the piece to convincingly possess agency in and of itself. For me, this pays homage to the human spirit, something embedded in the organic whole of body and mind. It is both a conceptual gesture and more than concept. I often find myself compelled to add the bird. It represents so much for me, not just the flight of thought across time and space, but also the wisdom of communing with the natural world. Our original mammalian ‘Eve’ was a rat like creature that managed to survive the catastrophe that destroyed most of the dinosaurs.* But some of those dinosaurs did survive to evolve as the amazing birds that populate this miraculous Earth. They speak of astonishing resilience across the millennia. All life on this planet is vulnerable, nothing is permanently static and human beings are notoriously riddled with anxiety. Yet I believe we find wisdom in homage rather than our characteristic urge towards dominion.

  • This from Cat Bohannon’s inspirational book ‘Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.’ 2023, ISBN 978 1 529 15123 7
  • All the more distinguished photographs of work since 2002 are by Peter Huggins https://huggins.co.uk