Katusha Bull

Most of this year has been a succession of sofa days after I shredded the cartilage in my “good” knee heli skiing in Canada in January. It was then a long wait to having both my knees replaced on May 12th. Yes, at once!

Since then my rehabilitation has been punctuated by many a day of finding out how much, “too much” activity is but I am now starting work again if a little tentatively.

Very happily for me, my return to work comes on the heels of a very exciting event. Through my association with the Royal British Society of Sculptors, I was given the opportunity to show five of my sculptures in a solo show, over August at Christie’s South Kensington and I am delighted to be able to report that three of the five sculptures has sold. One of the sculptures was whisked away to Norway and another to San Diego!

I will also be exhibiting with Vernissage at Art London in October so it’s all systems go with lots of fab stone in my studio waiting to be carved… yippee.

With somewhat patchy cyber connectivity in Marble, and with a treasure trove of stones to choose from, I gave up even trying to blog during the summer and devoted my energies to carving, carving and just a bit more carving instead.I managed to rough out 12 pieces which is something of a record for me and thankfully they have all arrived safe and sound here in London where some have been completed already. (see 2010 gallery page)

Arrived in Marble last night and was down to the worksite to set up my work area bright and early

This green stone is described by my stone supplier in Vancouver, as brucite. It has a rather wonderful array of green to bluish gray colours in it and can at times be reasonably translucent.

It is quite a lot harder that alabaster and grinds better than it chisels as the crystals can tear out rather than cut cleanly. Also the hardness varies hugely within the rock.

My aim is to get as big a triangulate shape hollowed out within the piece as possible. The limitations are on getting the tools in there to do it. This is the easy part done.

What can I say? When the pace of my life speeds up, blogging drops off the radar. No doubt a very middle aged set of priorities!

So what have I been doing since the beginning of May other than spending a completely disproportionate amount of time on the telephone to customer services at Virgin? This…

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I was in such a frenzy of stone removal that I gave myself quite a start when suddenly I had this left.

Just a few days ago, it seems, I broke through the middle of the sculpture and then time just took off. Mostly I was so involved with the piece that I worked until all I could do when I got home was pour myself a sundowner and head for a hot bath. No energy left for answering emails or blogging.

Next, I got to here

and before you knew it to here

then here

Today I made some final corrections and got a preview about how it might look polished

I do love this bit where you finally break through the middle and now the shaping takes place from the inside out as well as from the outside in.

From here it feels like progress is accelerating as soon you can judge how the sweeps align. Slightly panic inducing at times when nothing really seems to come out where you thought it would but great satisfaction when parts come together

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From making the hole through to this point seemed to take no time at all and it is quickly coming to the really fun part of making a sculpture.

We had a lovely hike out on the high plains of Victoria, real Man From Snowy River country, and I came across this rock.

Sadly it was huge and part of the mountain so I couldn’t prise it out and put it in a backpack to bring back to my studio to play with.

The silver wire twist has been sitting on my windowsill for months but until I got the inspiration to weave the copper wire through it, it was just a rather elegant but unfathomable shape as far as a maquette went.

In my excitement about getting back to work, I forgot to photograph the stone with all of it’s craggy protrusions, but here it is, all the usable mass, ready to align the maquette and get going.

The stone looks like it could turn out to be really translucent and quite deep in colour possibly like bitter beer but it’ll be a while before that’s obvious.

This turned out to be most gratifying to be able to have a second go at a gorgeous piece of stone.

The character of the piece is much more ethereal but I think it has worked.

And here is my finished hand saying cheerio as I am off to Australia this evening for three weeks for my nieces wedding. Don’t know if there will be any blogging ops.