The backdrop

It’s only a few weeks until the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, and I’m excited to be involved this year. I have been asked to create a sculpture for the Talitha Arts Garden, designed by Norfolk based Carey Garden Design Studio.

The design (shown above) incorporates two main sculptural elements; 250 handmade white porcelain butterflies, created by ceramicist Naoko Tagai, and my Chrysalis Sculpture, made from Portuguese limestone. The garden unites sculpture, performance and planting – representing the wide spectrum of therapeutic arts. A minimalist palette of two main colours conveys the delicate moment between darkness (trauma) and light (transformation).

Talitha Arts is a charity that delivers “transformative therapeutic arts workshops for vulnerable groups to support their mental health and well-being. Our bespoke, person-centred workshops are run by a combination of trained arts therapists and professional creatives, and allow space for creative expression, community engagement, and empowerment through movement, group work and integrative arts activities (including visual art, drama, music and movement). Talitha seeks to restore dignity, renew hope and release potential through the therapeutic arts.”

My role

My challenge has been to design and carve the main sculptural element in the garden, and to source some stone boulders that will create rustic informal seating within the setting. The colour scheme is white, pink and green. After several meetings we opted for a hard limestone from Portugal called Rosal for the main sculpture. I selected a piece with lots of shell and interesting markings. We were not searching for anything too plain or pure, and in fact Joe and Laura preferred this to Italian Marble or a really fine-grained limestone. We felt something with more character was more appropriate, a nod towards the idea of the stone displaying its history, and how that relates to a person having had a unique journey to arrive at this point, and how our journeys affect our appearance and the scars, both internal and external, that we accumulate on the way – scars that teach us, scars that make us.

The natural boulders, an earthy pink in colour, are St Bees sandstone. They are reclaimed, and have been left mostly unworked, earthy touchstones, a place to ground yourself. We chose stones that were quite weathered and mossy. We will use some smaller pieces of reclaimed St Bees stone elsewhere in the garden for stepping stones and accents around the planting. All the offcuts and waste from making the Chrysalis were kept to create ‘bespoke gravel’. This meant crushing and hammering the pieces until they were the right size. It took quite a while but we felt it was better than it all ending up in my skip, my assistant Sam enjoyed his time on the chain gang. The gravel will therefore resonate well with the sculpture, and colour-wise the smaller butterfly elements will chime with the chrysalis. The concept of the garden as a whole is symbolically about regeneration and the therapeutic affect of participation in and the enjoyment of our creativity. You can check out Carey Garden Design on instagram to find out more about the Talitha garden itself, and see more examples of their wonderful work.

Making the Sculpture

I opted for a tortoiseshell butterfly chrysalis, as they are quite a distinctive and interesting form. In nature they vary considerably, especially in terms of colour and markings, but the basic shape is quite consistent, and not too simple or indistinct or blobby. This lead to lots of research, looking at hundreds of images online, watching videos of butterflies emerging and even looking at scans. I always like to know about what I am about to carve, it helps me to commit fully to what I am doing. What is inside that shell? Which way round is the caterpillar inside it? What is the structure beneath the lumpy surface? There’s a very magical process happening in there. Following this research I made a full size printout of the basic shape of the chrysalis, seen from different angles, to work from.

The ‘spiky bits’ are actually the back of the chrysalis, it would be easy to think that’s where the legs are. The antennae and legs can just about be seen in the left hand image. This full size printout was used to mark up the stone, as can be seen in the next few images. The block was 800 x 350 x 350mm, and weighed 230kg.

A lot of the initial stages in making this sculpture are basically masonry work, using the printout as section templates effectively and shaping the two profiles through the stone. We do a lot of this ‘roughing out’ work with angle grinders, using whatever blades and discs work best, working outside as much as possible, in any weather, due to the dust. Once these profiles are done, we have now found the outer extremities of the shape from the front/back and sides.

This is still very much a squared off form, and there’s a lot of stone yet to remove. This is where I needed to think carefully about the form inside the block, and to think about the relative depths of the different planes and how to make the raised bumps/spikes on the back of the chrysalis. Making a raised form in stone (unlike clay or plaster for example) requires taking all the material away around these bumps as opposed to building up or adding material. This is why working stone in this way is incredibly time consuming.

In the next few images I am working out what goes where, and how it all fits together as a form. The whole time I am looking at lots of images online, especially views from different angles. This is where google image searches becomes such a useful tool. As I work this all out the form becomes more rounded.

As you can see the sculpture is developing now and I am starting to work out the proportions and how I would like to represent the form in stone. I usually carve for a while, then stand back and sketch, then carve. There is inevitably a certain amount of trial and error involved, experimenting and simplifying, accentuating and improvising. For example I felt it was sensible to underplay the spikiness on the back, as this will ultimately be set in a public place, as will all the Chelsea Gardens, and this will help to make the stone less vulnerable to damage and also less likely to hurt anyone in the garden.

Just roughing out this shape to this point took over two weeks. This stone is hard and brittle so it takes time to work it. If this was a soft limestone or York stone for example it might be finished by now! The next few images show the development of the shape and some of the details starting to emerge.

In the images above you can see that I have moved from outside to indoors and I have ditched the grinder for the hammer and chisel. Less dust, more control, different noises. This is where the sculpting starts to flow. I am considering how to represent different parts of the form, and also making artistic judgements on what needs to be included, for example do I try and carve the small ‘spiracles’ (breathing holes) and whether to polish parts of the stone or whether to leave some rough textures. I felt it was good to polish some of the surface as it showed the markings in the stone. I also felt some contrasting tactile surfaces would be ideal.

Rosal is a Jurassic sedimentary limestone, formed around 175,000,000 years ago. This means it was once the bed of the sea, as can be seen in the fossilised shells on the polished surface of the stone. When I say polished, it is actually more honed, a fine rubbed matt surface. This has been rubbed to around 220 grit wet and dry, I didn’t want it to be too shiny.

The finished piece

The next few images show the finished piece, prior to setting it onto a strong stainless steel dowel.

I drilled a hole in the back of the sculpture, and set in a stainless steel sleeve. In the Talitha garden this will be mounted on a pole that is attached to the framework of the garden. The whole structure of the garden is fabricated in metal and then the soil and planting is added to it.

In the finished garden the sculpture will be surrounded by plants, and leading the eye to the sculpture will be the ‘kaleidoscope’ of butterflies (surely one of the best collective nouns out there). I am very excited to see this Chelsea Flower Show Sculpture in its intended setting, but in the meantime here it is fixed onto a wall in my gallery.

I hope you found this interesting and maybe we will see some of you at the show in May 2023.

Here are some short videos of me working on the stone.