Artist Statement:
Absolutely no one at art school had known how to carve. It was not until five years of post college wilderness had passed by that I began to learn. It happened under the guidance of an eccentric and brilliant man in Oxford called Michael Black. He had sculpted the emperors heads around The Sheldonian years before I met him, but now, due to old age and a car accident he needed help with his work.
Michael taught me most of what I know of the craft of carving. He taught me the importance of cutting in dark shadows and how the resulting contrast will seem to pull the lighter areas out towards the viewer. I also learnt the importance of standing back in order to see the work from far off. Under this informal apprenticeship I picked up innumerable subtle things that are impossible to learn any other way.
Michael encouraged me to start my own carving. I had wanted to work before, but the years at college had introduced so many new ideas, so many styles, so many materials that the millions of possibilities and legions of brilliant predecessors made me not only uncertain of how to proceed, but frozen in panic. Eventually I imposed a set of rules in order to cut down the avenues open to me. For instance, in one sculpture I ruled that the carving should only have convex forms. This revealed more possibilities that I would have imagined and where freedom had been overwhelming, the imposed restriction was liberating. These early carvings were figurative; abstraction didn't come to me until much later and it came from an unexpected quarter.
Shortly after I started to carve in relief there arose the question of how to treat the area behind the figure. Is it landscape? A void? Or does it suspend and animate the figure? Van Gogh's skies sometimes seem as solid and real as the things below. This background now seemed to be at once not only important, but everything. It seems to me that we almost cease to exist without that which supports us. The figure dwindled in my interest and affection: it seemed bossy and prescriptive when set against the background which enigmatically allowed it to be. Yet still I doubted if a carving without the figure could hold sufficient interest.
The last figurative carving I did was of a goat. Following the lines of the hair of the goat with the chisel I became fascinated with those areas where the hair flows meet. At these junctions the hair swirls and eddies and seems either to come out away from the body, or to swirl inwards like at the corner of the eyes.
This observation became the start for my first series of abstract carvings. Once more I set myself rules to follow. The stone was to be pierced right through in places, creating dramatic dark 'wounds' and the surface then treated with the rules decided upon for this particular piece. For instance that the lines should always flow directly away from each edge and that they must spiral into a hole. Curious and unpredicted areas of stillness arise where the carved lines flowing between three or more fissures slide past each other. Conversely, as the surface is worked over it becomes increasingly animated. It amazes me to discover that the natural world is made up of things created through the repetition of a simple set of instructions. Indeed that the creation of such complexity can be derived from a simple process.


Bibliography:

1998		The Art of Enticing Animals into the Garden, by Tony Venison, Country Life, July
2001		Walking and Carving, Resurgence Magazine, July / August
2002		Almost Famous, The Times, August
2003		Region Landscape Inspires Sculptor, Western Morming News, May
		Hanging Rock, The Times Magazine, Hilary Rose, (photos John Carey) May
		Britons Find Form, Felicity Owen, Country Life, August