I have always had a great interest in, and love of, ancient and medieval stone architecture, and I initially studied history of art at university, specialising in the medieval era. In 1989 I saw a photographic display in Chichester Cathedral in Southern England about the work of the stonemasons there and I knew that this was the career I wanted to pursue. My original intention was to participate in the restoration / conservation of historic monuments, and I worked on several important medieval church buildings in the UK, including Ely Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. In 1996 I went to Pietrasanta, Italy (a small town near to Carrara with a long history of artistic work in marble), where I specialised in fine classical ornament in marble. Here I came into contact with many artists, and was inspired to start to look at what I wanted to say artistically as well as developing my craft skills.
In 1999 I won first prize at the Verona International Sculpture Symposium with my sculpture Hidden Landscape. This was my first work to explore the theme of internal architectural spaces, which has been a common theme in most of my subsequent work.
My work is inspired by the buildings that remain as a legacy of the past, particularly religious architecture and its use of space and light to symbolically represent spirituality and the divine. While I often make works that are historically very specific to just one time and culture I also try to balance this with less specific and more abstract works that draw on the use of space and light in architecture in a more general sense. Being trained as a crafts person I am also very concerned with the process of working the material - the creation of space and form simply through removing solid stone - and I try to express this in the works. It's an important part of my artistic concept that each sculpture is carved directly from a single piece of solid stone, with none of the elements added in afterwards.
I like mostly to work with natural boulders of stone, being inspired by the shape to create an internal world, or a fragment of a world, that is in essence quite separate from the world outside. I find that working in miniature helps to express this, through the creation of something that can appear monumental even at a small scale. This is a common theme in all of my sculptures, even the more abstract works that are still intended give the sense of larger spaces that we can imagine walking through.
