New Sculpture: TORSO III – Prometheus Devoured (Reclaimed metal 78cm x 67cm x 44cm / 31in x 26in x 17in)

This is one of an ongoing series of sculptures inspired by my reimagining of Damien Hirst’s ‘documentary’ of ‘The Wreck of the Unbelievable’ as actually having discovered sculptures which suggested that the ancients had invented Cubism/Modernism thousands of years ago.

It was instigated by an article highlighting Giovanni Battista Bracelli’s 17th Century engravings which seemed to contain hints of an early Cubist style even then.

My work is usually based upon the human(oid?) figure and I also love the ancient Classical legends and art. As is the case with a lot of my art, the style is influenced by Picasso’s approach to form, but also by my recent discovery of the work of Julio Gonzalez and David Smith.

I’ve been experimenting on and off for some years with making small maquettes formed from ‘flat materials’ through scoring and folding, similar to Picasso’s paper-based figurative sculptures. I love the idea of creating ‘volume’ from ‘flatness’. I also very much like Henry Moore’s (or was it Barbara Hepworth’s?) description of holes linking one side of a sculpture to the other so I thought this would be a good opportunity to play with those ideas, especially given how ‘flat’ the material used to make the sculpture is.

Recently, I’ve been looking at a lot of vintage anatomical medical illustrations and thinking about Francis Bacon’s use of images of butchery in his visceral paintings, so am trying to find ways to incorporate these into my art.

I hope viewers might believe that this sculpture, whilst being in a modernist style, looks as if it could have been discovered on the seabed, encrusted in barnacles and coral, as Damien Hirst’s creations were, but, that in my reimagining, viewers might also stretch their incredulity and believe that it might actually be genuine and provide evidence of a previously undiscovered artistic period in the ancient world..