In the mid-eighties, I became interested in working, in a direct way, with material that would take immediate impressions of touch.

Lead always dealt with a condition, with taking the body as a readymade and making an indexical case. Now I was looking for ways of working where imagination could feed directly into material, like drawing.

, using brick clay to make doll’s-house sized archetypal houses. 

 evokes both claustrophobia and dream space, as well as tackling the mind-body divide.

, with a terracotta egg that balances on the head of a walking bodycase, and 

, where a terracotta homunculus sits on the head of a walking man preceded by a lead shadow. Here, the lead bodycase, which is made for a real body, is held between an abstract and an imagined body.

, a piece that evokes the potential of clay: two lumps of clay cupped in either hand like a set of scales, evoking the potential combination of imagination and substance through the hands of the worker.

, a bodycase gazes into an empty amphora. This contrasting of closed and open is like the earlier lead bowl and seed pieces.

. It started with seeing a relief by Lorenzo Maitani on the façade of Orvieto Cathedral, which shows the creation of Eve when she is rising out of Adam’s side. I took this as a parable about man’s unconsciousness and feeling of a lack of responsibility for his own destiny. This is the mythical moment when duality and the possibility of evil comes into the world, and Adam is asleep.

I started with the idea of making Eve as a mushroom cloud coming out of Adam’s side, but in the end it was all too metaphorically and physically heavy, and the solution was to make a line of walking terracotta figures that slink behind the head of the sleeping bodycase, as if a dream of history is passing behind an unconscious body.

The challenge was to wake Adam, as the viewer, up, and make him somehow the subject of time’s gaze - both history and the future. 

: the final emancipation of terracotta, but before then there were a few works like 

, that attempted, through scale, to make a field or crowd of small bodyforms that stood for a human population.

Terracotta And Lead Works

, 1984, lead, terracotta, fibreglass, plaster and air, 65 × 220 × 110 cm. Collection of Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria.

Home

, 1983-84, lead, terracotta, fibreglass and plaster, 140 × 85 × 140 cm. 

Out Of This World

, 1983-84, terracotta, lead, air, plaster and fibreglass, 235 × 300 × 75 cm. 

The Beginning The Middle The End

, 1984, lead, terracotta, fibreglass and air, 195 × 192 × 30 cm. Bonnier Collection, Stockholm, Sweden.

Work

, 1985, terracotta and lead, 62.5 × 62 × 50 cm. 

Earth [And Water]

, 1985, terracotta, lead, plaster, fibreglass and air, figure: 50 × 111 × 54 cm, pot: 50 × 123 × 50 cm. 

View

, 1985, lead, plaster, fibreglass, air and terracotta, figure: 50 × 185 × 63 cm, terracotta figures: dimensions variable.

Man Asleep

, 1983-85, lead, fibreglass, terracotta and air, dimensions variable.

Under The Sun

, 1985, terracotta, lead and fibreglass, house: 62 × 78 × 39 cm, body: 46 × 92 × 38 cm.

Terracotta And Lead Works

Related content

New Sculpture

Sculpture