Since my mid twenties I have worked as a sculptor, my practice is to me indivisible from my identity. Being a sculptor does have practical and financial aspects that need attending to in order to remain viable but I do believe it is more than a job as it offers me the opportunity to discover, filter and reorder the world as I encounter it. I have no doubt that if I had not become an artist I would have made many more bad choices in my life and would have encountered a lot more misery. As a direct result of being an artist I have continued my education, broadened out my experience and found purpose. The values that I place on my Art or at least what I aspire to are addressed below.
Historically Artists were divided into two groups – those who chose beauty and those who chose virtue. To update this into modern parlance – pick either aesthetics or criticality. I really don’t see why you have have to hitch up to one or the other, they can be twin pursuits.
I do want my sculpture to have formal values, to express things like material, surface, edge, scale, volume and gravity. I want the work to be made competently, its presence should be engaging enough for the viewer to want to spend time with it. Crucially I hope this interaction facilitates intellectual engagement.
I want my sculptures to suggest to the viewer both what is now and what has always been, I want the work to be simple and complex, familiar and ambiguous, everyday and weird. The key value these elements produce is doubt and doubt I believe is a precondition for civilisation. Societies that permit doubt, are tolerant, questioning and adaptable. This is what I want to express in my work.
The Russian filmmaker Tarkovsky said that -“The role of the Artist is not to propose solutions but to set questions in their requisite depth”.
