Nike of Samothrace.
As a secretly troubled boy, my mother took me to Florence.
To show me Michelangelo’s “unfinished" works.
“That's what you are”, she said, alluding to my youth, I supposed.
But I saw my own reason: they were trapped in stone.
Then she took me to the Louvre, Paris.
I stared up at Nike of Samothrace.
Her head was missing, and her arms – but she had wings.
She was alighting onto the prow of a ship.
Triumphant from battle.
I fell in love with her.
So when I grew up I moved to the marble mountains in Italy.
To sculpt figures.
But I could not carve a single one of my feelings.
So I lost myself in abstract work.
I shan't attempt to define abstract work here, it is such a loose term that it means almost nothing.
But for me...my abstract is a place outside of human time. A timeless place empty of human objects. A spartan environment designed to encourage the temporary separation – distancing of the mind from the psyche and from the id.
The result into these forays are works that are self-containing and inward-looking. They seem to exist alone, unaware of the viewer.
And I found some kind of peace there that others recognised.
A vindication.
And the joy of sharing with others.
In gardens, rooftops, interiors, foyers, lobbies.
I am proud to have produced this work that comes without baggage.
But thirty years have passed now, and with new evidence, the psyche and the id, who were never that guilty in the first place, deserve parole.
A while ago, I ran out of marble blocks, so with no plan or idea, I began carving an odd-shaped scrap.
And found a figure – my Nike.
And then I began to slowly realise that over the past three decades, day by day, as a human being in a world of them, I had been witnessing, under brave faces, all of us struggle.
And all the while, they have quietly been repairing me.
These figures are created to honour these day-to-day heroes.
With all their merits and weaknesses.
Their frailties.
Their burden of understanding mortality.
Their reckless love.
They are damaged.
They have gained qualities because.
My plan is to fill a large space with them.
Small and life-size works.
A vignette of our condition:
The violence.
Suffering.
Damage.
Scars.
Struggle.
Hope.
Vigour.
They are warriors
They are broken but unbreakable.
They are all of us.....unfinished.
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea."
T.S. Eliot
