Ashdown Gallery in Forest Row East Sussex are showing 22 of mine and Lorna’s Collaborative pieces as well as some individual work this month.This is the culmination of a lot of hard work and planning as well as the vision of Juliet and team at the Gallery to facilitate showing the work in a space so conducive and to their benefit.It goes without saying that we are all really excited.

As part of this exhibition I am showing 4 sculptures and wanted briefly to share a little of my working method with any readers.I work by hand with locally sourced wood,a later part of the process may include an electric sander or router but the main work is with mallet,chisel,file and saw.I do this to enable being in tune with my material,working faster with more mechanical tools would make the piece develop too quickly and mean I would miss the subtlety of my material.The considerations of form and texture I’m interested in can only be arrived at by working slowly by hand and feeling the piece as well as living with it a little.By default this means sculpture takes time and patience but the results are truly in tune with the material as a consequence.Because of the labour intensive nature of this type of work I only sculpt for part of the year usually reverting to painting ,writing and of course collaborations at other times.Concentrating on one medium e.g Wood and the associated physical effort until finishing projects leaves me fresh afterwards to consider other mediums,I’m at this stage now and will revert to painting again soon.The recently completed sculptures are being displayed for the first time at Ashdown Gallery ,I’m delighted to see them there and I hope a few people will see them in person.