Sculpture SOS

The original Twitter ‘advert’ for my SculptureSOS competition.

At the start of the Summer holidays 2020 it was obvious, as the country came out of lock-down, that the Summer was still going to be overshadowed by its effects and many of the places and organisations that I would normally provide workshops for, museums, theatres, visitor centres etc. were either staying closed or had very strict ‘distancing’ procedures in place which meant that art workshops were not an option.

So I decided, as I had time on my hands, to run an online sculpture competition. I would offer to create a sculpture for a school based on an idea of their choice and donate it to them for when the children returned in September. I thought that lots of schools might have an empty wall space to fill or an unloved bit of corridor that might need updating. A project like this would not only give the school a quality piece of artwork that the children could enjoy on their return but, for me personally, it would give me something creative to focus on while things were quiet and might also provide some publicity that could hopefully lead to new work connections or future projects.

So, I came up with the hashtag #SculptureSOS and put out a message online asking teachers and others who worked in education to nominate their school and give me a brief description of what their sculpture might be. I gave people a week to do this and compiled a list of all of the different ideas. At the end of this time I’d received about 140 replies from all over the UK and so I carefully went through them and narrowed this list down to three that I thought were very different to each other but also achievable within the time-frame.

I then put these three ideas back online on a 24 hour Twitter ‘poll’ so everyone had the chance to vote for which one they would like to see me create. After the poll ended there was a very clear winner, with about 65% of the votes it was the idea that had been sent in by Rebecca West from The Ursula Taylor School, in Bedfordshire. Her idea had been to create a large open book with different characters or elements from stories spilling out. The school had recently introduced a new theme to promote literacy called “Where will reading take you?” and therefore this idea would tie in with that initiative.  

My sketch of the design based on Mrs West’s idea and description.

The cardboard ‘base’ for the book.

So, after liaising with Mrs West and throwing a few ideas back and forth I came up with a sketch of how I thought the sculpture might look. We decided not to use actual ‘characters’ but to stick to ‘elements’ of stories that could be attributed to many different themes or story-lines, for example, a castle, a sea monster, a space ship. Once we’d agreed on the basic design I built the main cardboard ‘storybook’ shape and began to gradually add the details. The whole piece took about 12 days to create with each element being made, sometimes separately, and then fixed into place and carefully strengthened with paper mache to hold it securely in position. Once all of the different aspects of the design were complete I then added some different collage textures and painted on some basic undercoat colours. Finally I spent about two days carefully painting all of the details, highlights and shadows.

Construction of the main elements.

The final sculpture will now be delivered to the school where hopefully it will encourage the children there not only to read and explore more imaginative literacy but also it might inspire them to have a go at doing some more 3D artwork of their own.

The finished artwork.

Close-up of the dragon and the mermaid.