New Work In Progress

In preparation for my up-coming solo show, 'Found Memories', at the Nancy Victor gallery in February I've been working on a new sculpture. Well, I say new – the inner section (made up of an old, cracked, porcelain doll's head and several crab legs) was something that I put together some time ago and then left on a shelf to gather dust because I couldn't decide what I wanted to do with it. This isn't the way I usually work. Usually I have an idea for a sculpture – refine the idea with a few preliminary drawings and then build the thing. But every so often I'll tinker with a few bits and pieces/materials and come up with one of my 'components' – something that I don't feel is strong enough to hold its own as a sculpture but which I might one day become part of one.


One of the reasons that I hadn't, until now, taken this particular component piece any further was that my original ideas for displaying it didn't quite sit right in my head. It wasn't until I'd made my tall Orifice Tower sculpture that I hit on how the component piece (which I'd just been calling Crab Doll Head – not a snappy title, I know) should progress. I wanted to encase Crab Doll Head in a protective structure that would hold the fragile piece in place but which, unlike my previous lens-fronted cabinets/boxes, would also allow more light to hit it and also give a 360° view. And the scaffold-like framework approach that I used when making Orifice Tower seems perfect for this. It's a very enjoyable and organic (even though the structure is itself geometric in construction) way to work and I almost feel as if the framework is suggesting its own path as much as I am directing it. At the moment, the sculpture is starting to look oddly shrine or chapel-like. Maybe I should call it the Little Church of Lost Innocence (or maybe not).