The ecstasy of dance

As a life-long dance-lover, it’s no surprise that I have sought collaborations with dancers. But it’s more than that. I feel a strong connection between sculpture and dance. Sculpting, as with dance, is visceral, it’s story-telling, it’s choreography.

My first series of dancing figures are developed through a collaboration with dancer and performer Elena Saorin. We choreograph ideas together, always searching for dynamism in the pose. I find a real freshness and freedom from working loosely in wax, being inspired by the rough wax sculptural sketches found in Degas’ studio on his death.

Bronze is the perfect medium to capture this. Using bronze enables me to freeze a moment of a gravity-defying dance pose, to exude the joy and ecstasy of dance. There is something timeless about bronze. Yet you can sense the connection with artists of the past like Degas, Rodin and Matisse, who used exactly the same bronze-casting techniques as we use today.

I love bronze. But despite all my efforts to breathe life and movement into my public art statues and my dancing figures, ultimately bronze is inert. This is why I am exploring the intersection of dance and sculpture, by working with dancers as my dynamic modeling material.

For further details of this limited edition of ‘Dance’ bronzes, see the Dance section (under Portfolio) of the website.