15/03/2021

This new sculpture came from wanting to try out making a painting into a three dimensional object. The painting is a yellow pearly cutout with biopmorphic curves with a ruffled fringe and a boot on one foot. About the form itself; I had in mind a stone sculpture I'd seem outside the Royal Academy - I think it was by Phyllida Barlow - which looked like a deflated sea-cucumber. This deflation seemed humorous to me, slightly satirical, as though sculpture is a puffed-up thing to be, and needs taking down a peg or two. It also gave it some kind of narrative - what had it looked like and what would it look like when it had finished deflating?

Also I liked the idea of this object being a 'windbag' - the pomposity of the site, outside the RA, among the grown-up sculptures. It made me think of ageing, the sculpture getting withered and wrinkled like a balloon, a sculpture that was allowed to be a bit silly. I wanted to carry this look of inflation/deflation into my own sculpture - this slight silliness, the connection of its being like one of those crazy blow-up figures that are no more than a bit of cloth over a fan, dancing outside a burgher joint.

Like all my work, the sculpture's about my size and made of plaster over a wooden and cardboard armature. The decoration was so fun to do - I had no plan beyond starting to copy the existing painting. It was like decorating a pot, a finished form, but with the liberty of responding to the form underneath, nothing practical, no particular idea. Because I felt the painting worked well, it gave me a freedom to lift constraints and paint intuitively, feeling small discomforts at the discords that arose within the decorative 'scheme' as I worked.

The name - I was thinking of a very bossy man I knew, and the Carly Simon song 'You're so vain'.