Moving along

As the house is busy with folk, and as I`ve been itching to make a start on the sleeping figure, I put on an extra layer of clothing and a woolly hat and lumbered the slab of wood to the back of the garden and into my shed. This small wooden building was created as a sculpture space but more recently has been buried in garden tools and a jumbled host of utilitarian hooks, screws, clamps, drills, plaster and cement, and whatever else has needed storing after a household repair has been made. 

The drawing was completed weeks ago, but sculpting is as different to drawing as map reading is to rambling. I think I was fairly daunted at just how to approach the carving, the combination of dense, fragile foliage and the solid soft cylindrical shapes of a reclining female figure; at how the two elements would wrap around each other.

Well, the only solution is to start carving. And so I have begun

In the doing, solutions to the puzzle will reveal themselves. Additionally, new ideas will emerge: perhaps deeper layers of plant life, birds, animals, insects, as I excavate down into the wood, past the surface detail