25 Years of Making Sculpture


 
Phil, the guy that does my patination at the foundry, asked me today what all the work was for…what exactly is this 25 year show? 

I explained the car boot fair story, the endless craft fairs, the driving miles, sleeping in the van, then the larger fairs at the NEC and Business Design Centre.

Eventually I hired a rental gallery on Cork Street because although I didn’t have the confidence to approach a gallery myself, I clearly felt I had the balls to hire one! It was a good call, leading to a gallery in Zurich etc, but I still couldn’t afford a hotel so spent the show sleeping downstairs in the broom cupboard!

At the foundry we carry on working, I’m fettling and grinding, Phil is patinating Bird Bath. In the break, Phil asks, “So did you not get fed up when you didn’t have any money?” 

I don’t actually have an answer to that, I don’t really remember thinking there was a choice. I was a sculptor, it’s just what I did.

Below is a picture of me making my first really big piece in 1997, a waste mould in plaster, poured in sections of solid resin and rocks around a steel frame… I knew it was not necessarily the best way to make a resin sculpture, but it was the cheapest and all I could afford.


 
Working fairs and being in front of the public all the time, has its ups and downs, there were compliments, and even sometimes queues, but you only really notice the negative comments. I always remember two ladies glancing left at my stuff, saying without breaking pace, “Oh I don’t like that? Do you like that? No, I don’t like that”.

Mummy and Daddy would often visit and sometimes ‘man the stall’. Mummy said she loved sitting on the stall because people would walk up to the display and she could see the feeling of her daughter’s work rushing over their faces, they opened up into a smile. Mummy would smile back!

Now that smile seems stronger, that feeling. I work out the front of my studio when waxing and finishing pieces. People make comments as they pass. One man last week leant over the passenger seat to say out of his car window…. ‘your work is awesome’! 

Yes, it made me very happy!  Mind you, I was finishing Silently Super and she is pretty powerful. I have come to understand this reaction to my work a bit more clearly this year.

For the first time in my life I have travelled East. I have flown across the sea for shows in New York and Miami, driven vans full up with sculpture across Europe but never over the round globe like that. I looked out the window the whole way, at the mountains around Kabul, weird flat plains of somewhere else, the shapes of the seas, and then in the dark the map of lights that grew bright and large over Delhi. It was just before New Year and I wrote in my sketchbook: 

Make 5 life-size sculptures that are alive with life force, that represent how fantastic it is to be alive, here, now. To be free. To be a woman, now, in Europe. The possibilities and positive-ness. Inspire, make people feel great. We already get enough negative impact. Make people feel good when they look at the work, when they walk past it in their hall or look out on a frosty morning to a bronze, standing tall, not proud but hopeful and above all alive, because that is a positive force.

Obviously, time and money do tend to get in the way of bold statements about 5 life-size sculptures, but I know they will arrive over the next few years, even if I have to be a little less independent and look for investment.

One customer who hadn’t seen my work for years, said something about how it had developed from earlier inward looking pieces she had, I asked her to write it down for me because I thought Mummy would like it, which kindly she did in an email later:

On reflection the ‘sadness’ is based on the two little figures of yours that I have. One is of a woman alone who looks sad/thoughtful and the other of a couple in a tight embrace. The strength I refer to seems to have always been present in the work I've seen but it is definitely now more visible to me. Your sculpture has moved on...  from the crouched sad woman to her standing tall, strong and taking on the world.

At the foundry, what dawned on me standing amongst this row of expensive bronzes waiting for Phil to colour, is that courage forms like stalactites - drips of sales, drips of confidence, a good year, a recession, a good year and onwards, slowly solidifying.

My customers have swept me along to where I am now, without their support I would still be sitting on that table at a car boot fair.

Carol Peace, November 2017