BIRDS

One of the most challenging … also the most enjoyable… things about sculpting these was just controlling the metal.

To give a sense of something being industrial and manmade is quite easy, when you’re making something out of metal. But to get something looking natural and flowing - I think that is a bit more of a challenge. So I really wanted to get the sense of the motion of the birds.

The process I went through was pencil sketches, looking at pictures of birds, looking at birds whenever I was out and about … just gazing up in the sky to see what the gulls were doing. And then making small card models of it.

And then in order to try and capture some of that movement from the card model going up into metal, I was literally scanning and tracing round these cardboard shapes and scaling them up onto the metal, and bending these curved metal sheets together … trying to capture that sense of movement again on the large scale.

It took quite a bit of finesse, looking at them – whether you believe it or not I don’t know – that was the thing I found most difficult but also most rewarding at the end of it.