Exploring a much simpler visual language has produced a greater need for me to invest in drawing as an act of investigation and a desire to bring the two activities of drawing and sculpting together. My drawings have now become more sculptural in their production with scratching and sanding into the surface of the paper. Correspondingly, the surfaces of my sculptures have become more like drawings. It seemed a very logical step to make the dots and dashes of the previous work into drawn lines that not only embellish forms but can describe them as well. Many of the sculptures made for the body of work titled ‘Odd Birds and Other Selves’ exploit this innovation. Looking at sculptures such as ‘Pink Lady’, ‘Eachway Heads’ or ‘High Flyer’ I find it exciting to find that the gouged marks in the surface of a sculpture can be perceived as form as clearly as the pencil line of a drawing on a piece of paper.
Working so closely with drawing has also had a creative affect on the objects themselves. Many of the works for this collection are not imagined interpretations of what the drawing might look like if it were to become three dimensional but are direct manifestations, so that pieces like ‘Spiky Dog or ‘Fancy Cat’ quite happily exist as sculptures with three legs, exactly as the drawing depicted in the first place.
This new simplicity of abstracted form and inscribed line allows the possibility of more vivid and dynamic colorations and the demand for this has led to a unique collaboration with Pangolin Editions to produce truly innovative uses of patination, paint and pigment. These new images have an individuality that sets them apart from other sculpture, setting them firmly in the twenty-first century and I believe bronzes have never looked so bedazzling.