My sleeping Angel reclines across a chaise lounge on a busy boulevard. She is a very popular meeting place for tourists and a defining feature in the suburb.

The sculpture is entirely covered with thousands of individually cut and carefully arranged mosaic tiles, some of which were made by hand.

I designed a higher-than-average seat so your legs can swing about while seated to create a playful floating experience.

The two short poems tiled onto each end of the seat are comprised of hand made Medieval style lettering.

One reads “Welcome One and All alike.… All ages, shapes and origins”.

My angel has been very busy entertaining passersby since she was installed at the site. I estimate conservatively… she’s already been sat on over seventy thousand times! Imagine if we could ask her what they were all talking about!

This pretty female bird is assembled entirely from pieces of beach junk eroded by the sea.

I just assembled what I found without altering any individual piece in the building process.

This hands off approach is important to me because I like the holistic idea of respecting what Nature provides us with. She hands us back our own junk but beatifies it with weathering and erosion.

Instead of always tampering, I allow Nature to guide my artistic journey.

Even though by itself it’s all valueless junk, I liaise with Nature to create new visual relationships, order, meaning and material value to the objects I find.

In this art project I tried to invent a completely new female creature… like I’m a God!

I joined together a random collection of bones and other natural objects without altering any single one, but used them as found in their natural state.

So what would she look like?.…. I had no idea!

After starting to build I soon discovered there are actually only so many ways you can convincingly fit two bones together. They are very precise jigsaw pieces and usually only fit where they are designed to go.

Gradually I could see a mythical animal starting to emerge. Maybe this resulted from the accumulative effect of inherited human fixations in my brain cells…… ideas we humans loved or feared to dream about on dark stormy nights…….something that we derived from the many different animals that have coexisted with us on Earth since primordial times..…!?

I thought it might help me to decide on what I was actually creating by modelling a little clay version of the mother’s skeleton…….just like God created Adam!…. It worked really well and resulted in a fleshed out life like baby animal.

So although I didn’t consciously try to make this animal it’s no surprise that I had created a what sort of animal….?

Answer: I created a….. nogarD

This ornately carved wooden sculpture is designed to be suspended.

It features two sections of interlinked chains that can move independently within each other on windy days. As the chains twist back and forth the entire sculpture gently swings.

Our ears and hands have unique sculptural shapes. This is particularly obvious when they are viewed in isolation as single objects. Just as every fingerprint is unique, no two hands or ears are ever identical.

All organic objects look inherently beautiful and complete in themselves, particularly when isolated from their surroundings. So I decided to present a single ear and a hand in this pseudo display trophy.

We humans seem to be genetically conditioned to admire organic forms, just as Zebras admire their stripes!

We have learned to identify with the shapes and patterns that nature can’t help repeating in nature.

I wonder if we will ever see ear or hand like shapes occurring in the cosmic that are many light years across.

Vi’s quote: “Nature has aesthetically inspired logic”.

This two part roof sculpture is about a gentleman’s marriage proposal to a glamorous angel.

Each stands atop a high staircase to gaze at the other across a wide and perhaps impassable void. He offers her a bouquet of flowers to fill the empty vase she is lifting towards him.

As their hopes for love rise, both summon what could very likely be a suicidal leap of faith!… and yet courageously they step out towards each other across the void.

Your question is, will they make it safely into each others arms?

Answer:
Luckily for them, we all know “Gentleman have faith and Angels can fly!” (Vi’s quote)

So are you hungry?… because this delicious meal is definitely not edible!

In this surreal artwork my fossil hunting scientist makes the find of his lifetime inside a glass domed ecosystem!

I played with perceptions of scale by arranging these little objects to create a life like story.

Even though they’re tiny objects each appears to be very large because of their arrangement.

The sculptural tower the scientist is standing on top of grows up from the small canvas painting below.

We can watch my little guy observing his awesome discovery. But he is occupied in his own world, completely unaware we’re all observing him!

My gently curving pastel coloured wall sculpture was created entirely from weathered objects found on the beach after a big storm.

I assembled each piece together into this squared form without altering the original shape of any individual object within it.

Erosion added texture and a soft patina to the surface of each object and guaranteed my final result would have a unique and uniform appearance.

The work includes an on off light feature to cast interesting shadow effects across the sculpture.

This is my second construction of a three-dimensional abstract sculpture. It looks like a two-dimensional abstract painting if viewed from directly in front.

Likewise, some of my flat paintings give the illusion of being three dimensional.

This rhythmic sculpture is about the life giving ability and kinetic energy of ocean waves.

Each flat slice of the wave progressively transforms it’s shape from one end of the sculpture to the other to create a ripple effect.

A clay link separates each panel from the next creating a vertebra like column that supports the middle of the sculpture.

My wave resembles some sort of exotic sea creature yet to be discovered.

Silhouetted at one end of the wave a seal miraculously appears and at the other end a dolphin surfs happily along.

Semi translucent plastic sheets create different shadow effects and a soft translucent frill along the edges of the work.

White or coloured lights can be projected across the form from different angles while reflections in the mirror below adds depth and complexity to this artwork.

In this fun sculptural wall work I have used various broken fragments off the beach to assemble two funny faces.

We humans strive for order in our lives but also like to hoard things and I love collecting junk!

I deliberately chose cuttlefish as the main shapes here because they are so beautiful and if left on the beach they would have quickly disintegrated. So, I saved them for prosperity like an archivist collects dried insects to pin inside a museum box.

Being an artist allows me to create impossible objects. I’ve taken entropy and miraculously turned it into order and purpose…..a bit like a God!

While working on this piece it occurred to me that the odds of these fragments accumulating by themselves on the beach like these two funny faces would be nearly impossible….. that is….about as likely as life having started on Earth!!!

Twenty years ago boxes of breakfast cereal contained plastic toys to surprise the children and encouraged them to eat their breakfast.

But sometimes children would feel around in the new box just to be the first one to get the toy.

Adults can be impulsive too and generally don’t consider the natural ecosystem that they are eating into three times a day.

We can be insatiable meat eaters, expecting to sample many different species of animal in a single restaurant meal.…….forever searching out new taste sensations to sample and exploit.

Even safari animals are on the menu in some countries. Alas, there seems to be no creature on Earth that is off limits and is not “fair game” for human’s to eat.

Another local government street art commission.

My robust metal amphora stands on a decorative plinth and has a vertically positioned flood light within it’s base.

It sports a swinging acrobat within the ribbed amphora.

This salvaged footwear I assembled and archived as a wall sculpture in 2022 may foresee human fate in the future.

It could have been made in 2058 by aliens attempting to piece back together the few fragile remains of human civilisation!

Aliens or not, artwork made today will most likely be interpreted differently by those in the future.

Reassembling the same objects in multiple ways also results in completely different meanings. Added to that….we all interpret a single arrangement of objects differently from each other. …and that’s all assuming we got the archiving right in the first place….!

This piece also has a strong conceptual relationship to my new kinetic sculpture “Carbon footprint”, that will be added here soon.

Another fantasy creation inspired by objects I found on the beach.

This playful totem pole has an interactive element. It can be displayed fully upright or deliberately bent into precarious positions that appear off balance for Lofty!

My seductively slippery eolian pole dancer with flowing blonde hair is performing her outrageous stage routine.

This is a fantasy character I created intuitively.

At the beach I’m attracted to pretty objects, like a Bower bird is to blue plastic! When I find objects initially I don’t know what to make with them… but invariably I pick up exactly what’s needed for later on. Everything gets used and seems to come together into cohesive sculptures.

“Beach Roaming” as I call it, allows me to extend my imagination to make these unique creations.

This mosaic sculpture commission features a gently twisting form that winds up to a contrasting crescent shaped top.

The garden sculpture has several wide flat planes running up the sides of the work with angled edges. This allowed me to clearly define a twist in the sculpture while at the same time making it easier to tile the wide flat surfaces.

I often use the visually implied action of a twisting shape in my illustrations, sculpture and clay work too. The twist gives changing shadow effects and structural complexity to an otherwise simple form.

The basic form of this sculpture was made by pouring concrete into a dedicated timber mould before it was assembled in sections at the installation site. Finally additional tiling was then attached to cover these joins.

This carved wooden sculpture was commissioned for the internal foyer of a large public building.

It is self-supporting because it cleverly interlocks the two ends of a single chain together to create this somersaulting shape.

The sculpture holds this expanded position due to the gravitational pressure on it’s parts without any fasteners being required to keep a circular shape.