Louisa Forbes ©

Lucy: And so, tell me about your process.

Louisa: I used to, before I got commissions, I used to just work straight with the clay. And I’d play around. I’d have a very loose armature very often suspended from a beam in my studio so that the wire coming down took the weight and I didn’t have to support it from underneath, and that gave me complete freedom with how I was making things. That sounds quite weird, doesn’t it?

But it’s just, most of the time you struggle trying to keep the clay up off the floor, off the ground so it doesn’t fall down, and this is a completely a new way of thinking. But with commissions, obviously you have to have far clearer understanding of where you’re going with it to be able to present it to the client and get their approval before you kick off. And you can’t really start playing around with limbs going all over the place and changing it radically halfway through.

So, yeah, that’s a bit of a learning curve. I started to have to do drawings and take maquettes on the bus and things like that. So it’s an interesting difference between commissioned and non-commissioned work, but, you know, one does have to prepare. And so I have sketch books. I do a lot of research. I do a lot of…if something can spark me from a face in a crowd, or a photograph, or anything, or a lot of my work comes from stories.

So, with the Stratford piece, the Puck piece, the brief was about Shakespeare, and about Bell Court, and Fountain Courtyard, which is where he’s actually sited, and I just felt Puck was such a good character as a fun person to have in a space like that. But he was going to have Titania and a relief on the wall, and a whole load of fairies, and owls, and God knows what. And it gradually got whittled down. I had a vision, because there was a green wall behind him, I had a vision of glow worms all through the wall. I thought that would have been really fun, and a very romantic place to meet a friend to go and see a film, or whatever.

Lucy: Oh, it sounds a shame that it didn’t all get…

Louisa: It would have been fun. But, you know, that’s the game. You know, you can’t choose everything.

Lucy: And so, do you prefer working to commission?

Louisa: Oh, I’m delighted when I am commissioned, obviously, because it funds the rest of it. But, no, I mean, either way. I’m just happy to be working.

Lucy: So the ideas come to you when you’ve got the outline for the commission? So it wasn’t a request for a Puck?

Louisa: Not at all. No. There were about sixty of us, I think, originally, who put forward proposals for this place, and they were a totally disparate lot. I mean, it was very, very different, and I think I just felt Stratford, you know, and it’s such a tourist venue, and it was a shopping mall, and it was something that would be easy to understand for everybody walking past who this little character was. And I was incredibly lucky to get it, really.

So, the idea of it was more about the place, and I think my own private work comes from a lot of it, from history and trying to understand ancient people, the people who lived thousands of years ago. I’m fascinated by early history, and particularly Minoan civilisation. So, just the connection between women, particularly women then and now, and the fact that we still think in the same way, we are still people. And that’s hard to imagine, isn’t it? That you could actually have a conversation with somebody from a few thousand years ago, and the same loves and interests and…

Lucy: That’s lovely. I love that.

Louisa: That’s what it’s all about, really. That’s the core of my work, what I’d love to be able to communicate, is that.

Lucy: And so, do you have a creative practice? Do you have a routine that you carry out every day?

Louisa: You’re gonna love this. It’s such a girly thing. I have to clean my space. And I can’t just go there and start work and unwrap stuff. I have to go and, you know, do a bit of hoovering, and sweep it up, and get the clay gone from the day before, and maybe make a coffee. And I often start drawing, and it just gets me there.

Lucy: It’s a nice little routine.

Louisa: And I’m, kind of, thinking while I’m cleaning, like which bits I need to change, or what needs doing to the sculpture. So it’s kind of an introduction. You just, you know…

Lucy: A transition. It is quite a difficult thing, to get into that sort of creative flow of working. And so, I think it’d, be like anything else, like an athlete warming up. It’s hard to jump straight in and do something.

Louisa: Yup. And sometimes I really enjoy the silence, and need to concentrate and have it completely quiet. And other times I listen to all sorts of weird stuff, a lot of Handel, a lot of music, early baroque, and a lot of…I used to listen to poetry quite a lot, because sometimes a line…listening to John Donne or something, just a line would give you that understanding, that kind of feeling of humanity, or something that would just spark, make you feel it and then you’re in it.

Lucy: So, do you use the poetry to inspire the work you’re currently on, or is it a catalyst for new ideas?

Louisa: It could be. It could be that that line just focuses me on what I’m feeling about the piece. It, sort of, brings me into it. But the strangest thing is it’s very absorbing, sculpture. And when you’re working with your hands like that, your mind can be all over the place. You can be thinking about…like when you’re driving and you suddenly think, “Help, I’ve missed the last 10 miles.”

Lucy: Yes. “Where has it gone?”

Louisa: And you think, “God. I haven’t been concentrating. It’s becoming bland, or whatever.”

But other times you’re in that mode, and then suddenly you see something in the clay, and you think, “Blimey. Did I do that?” And it becomes incredibly exciting because it’s as if somebody else is coming through me and making it. And it’s something so alive, and I need to catch it.

And you can miss it very easily, but it’s just the most exciting feeling, and I, kind of, live for that bit where the clay is just doing its own thing, and I’m almost not in control of it.

Lucy: It’s something alive in the clay, from what you’re saying.

Louisa: Definitely, definitely! Spend my life trying not to kill it.

Lucy: And so, are you producing at quite a rapid rate, or are some fast and some slow?

Louisa: Oh, that’s a good one. Sometimes I work for six months on a piece and then bin it, and then the next one will take half an hour. It’s so random. But I think a lot of it is because the working goes into the back of your mind in a way, and then it’s all there for the next piece, so it happens very quickly sometimes.

Lucy: And it’s not to do with mindset? Not to do with if you’re anxious or …I don’t know, the lockdown has upset a lot of writers, I think, that I know. It interrupted their creative process, but do you think that affects the speed for you?

Louisa: It did to start with. I started doing Zoom life drawing, which was hilarious. So, there was a ballet dancer in St. Petersburg, and a flamenco dancer from North London, they’re all modelling in their bedrooms…

Lucy: Brilliant.

Louisa: …for mad people like me on Zoom. That was brilliant, really good fun. And I think that was actually something good that came out because I was very sad not to be able to go life drawing, which I do a lot of. Zoom…I don’t know. I think the sculpture practice… I did get down, I did get low because I felt, apart from anything else, I live in a big place, so I didn’t have any help suddenly. And I had five people to feed who were working from home. So there was a lot of running around, and shopping, and feeding, and relentless, really, seven days a week with no end to it.