Family Group 2024

110 x 93 x 63 cm

Bronze Resin, on commission  Edition of 9 £ 9 800

Bronze, on commission,  Edition of 8 £26 000

On Exhibition at the Dorset sculpture  park  “Sculpture by the Lakes”.

You see the three figures  of “Family Group” , and they could be siblings, or another combination of family members. Their individuality emerges from the common and shared  “root stock”of their family. It is only their heads and one arm expressing their different and individual stances towards life and each other.

They huddle together around the two holes, the missing parts of the left and middle figure. Their voluminous masses are interlocked and overlapping, which describe their interdependent, partly enmeshed  and close relationships.

The holes contrast with the great mass of the three figures.They  connect the exterior planes with the interior volume of the sculpture. They  burrow through the sculpture with curved passageways, travelling from its front to its back, uniting them with each other.

Importantly, these holes  describe our hidden interior life, the experience of continuously living alone with ourselves – much in distinction to the “surface” persona we present to others. With family members we share a long past, and both our depth and our current surfaces play into family relationships.

The holes are also a metaphor of the “ missing bit”: this makes me think of Plato’s myth in the “Symposium”. He tells the story of how Zeus – fearing that the powerful humans  (at that stage four-legged and four-armed) would rise against him. So Zeus split these  human beings in half, creating the distinct male and female counterparts.

Beside explaining  sexual attraction, the myth speaks of the need for human relations in general; for not being whole by oneself, and needing something from others to feel complete; for working and living together as community and family.