Lucy: Hello Sculpture Vultures and thank you for joining me today. My goodness, it is wet and windy here in the UK. It has been creating a lot of disruption in our conservation work schedule because, as you know, that is mostly outdoors. I am absolutely sick to death of booking jobs in and then having to reschedule them again for a different day.

It is a real pain. It is not like in the old days where you used to be able to rock up and crack on with your work. When you work in public spaces, as we do, you need a million permits and health and safety checks and all that. It becomes a real headache when you have to keep changing the day.

So, moaning is over now, but I am very glad that we are actually at the end of the Remembrance work we have to do. It is always stressful making sure you get it all done before the big day, especially when you have weather disruption, which we have had this year. So now, after Remembrance work, we will be turning our attention to buildings.

We look after an awful lot of historical buildings in London, many of them commercial, along Oxford Street and Regent Street. As you will know if you have ever been down there to look at the lights, they do a lot of trade at Christmas and they need to look very good indeed. I particularly recommend looking at Selfridges, not just for the bronze, but because it has the most glorious window displays and Christmas elements. But do look at the bronze too, because not only do we look after it, it is genuinely very beautiful.

I have been to a brilliant exhibition this week, which I wanted to give a shout out to. It is nothing to do with sculpture, surprise surprise, but I saw the Kerry James Marshall exhibition at the Royal Academy. It is called The Histories. My goodness, it is great. Huge, colourful, really thought-provoking paintings placing Black figures at the centre of culture in a way they often have not been. I really enjoyed it. It is thought-provoking, entertaining and clever. And for anyone who enjoys little Easter-egg moments, there are so many art history references in there.

You cannot help enjoying that if you are someone interested in art history, because it gives you another layer. Every time you look at the paintings, you see something else. For that very reason, I am going back a second time because, even though I spent a good amount of time there the first time round, I felt I had not quite taken enough in. It is beautifully placed in the Royal Academy. It works so well in that space. You get some fabulous vistas of the big paintings. You can stand back and really take them in. I cannot eulogise enough about it. I think you will really enjoy it if you love these things, which you obviously do, or you would not be listening to me.

I also wanted to mention a sculpture that went in this month, which I think is significant, Mother Vérité. It is by British artist Raven Shalia de Clark. I have probably mispronounced her name and I am sorry if that is the case. It is a wonderful sculpture created in association with Chelsea Hirschhorn, founder of Frida Mom, a global brand dealing with baby products and aids that help parents. The sculpture is in Chelsea and it shows a postpartum woman at the entrance of the Lindo Wing at St Mary’s Hospital.

She is a big sculpture, three metres high. The postpartum state is not something that is regularly celebrated in art. It is a very significant part of a woman’s journey in life, and it is something that even women do not like talking about. There is still a lot of shame around how much your body changes. I think this is a really worthwhile and wonderful sculpture. Women’s bodies in sculpture should not only be gym-toned, idealised figures. We have plenty of those. Women’s bodies are beautiful and have been celebrated through history, but they also go through different stages and that should be acknowledged. I love it for that. I think it is a really good addition to London’s outdoor collection.

I am so excited to be bringing you today’s interview. It is with sculptor Tim Shaw, who is completely up my street. He has some really interesting works in bronze, but he is also a multimedia sculptor, so I cannot say it is only bronze. Still, I do love his bronze sculptures. He is very esteemed, one of Britain’s leading figurative sculptors. His work is interesting and brave, and it tackles difficult subjects with such a thoughtful hand.

I came across his sculpture Man on Fire, which won the 2024 Public Statues and Sculpture Association’s Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture. It is outside the Imperial War Museum in Manchester and it really struck me. His work is deeply affecting. There is something very profound about it. You should take the trouble to look at his sculptures because he explores subjects that have not been addressed in public sculpture before.

He is also an elected member of the Royal Academy of Arts and an elected Fellow of the Royal British Society of Sculptors. I began our conversation today by asking when sculpture had first come into his life.

Tim Shaw – Minotaur, 2008. Royal Opera House, London

Tim: Well, I think it began when I was a schoolboy, around the age of 14. For the first couple of years at school I did quite well academically, and then I decided I wanted to pursue the path of getting into trouble. I was a persistent offender of minor misdemeanours. I think there must have been some chat among the staff about what they could do with me, and my art teacher took me aside one day and said he would like me to work with some clay.

I thought, what a great idea. I can roll it into balls and throw it at people’s heads. But I asked him what he actually wanted me to do with it, and he said, I don’t know, make a head, make some hands, make something. So I said all right then. I began making these heads, then hands, then feet.

Pretty soon into modelling the heads and the hands and the feet, I realised I had a real ease with it, a natural facility for modelling. It took over my life. I knew from then on this would be what I would do for the rest of my life.

I was educated in Dublin, Belfast, Dublin again, and Enniskillen. I remember walking along the main street in Enniskillen and looking into a bookshop window and seeing this wonderful Thames and Hudson book on Rodin. I bought it. It was probably the first book I ever bought. I was not a great reader, but I read that book from cover to cover in a very short time. I remember looking at The Burghers of Calais and thinking it was a piece of work with such deep soul and understanding of existence.

I thought, this is where I want to go, quite simply. I remember my mother asking what I thought I should do with my life, and I said I wanted to be an artist. I think she actually cried. Growing up in Northern Ireland at that time was hard, and she had no idea how I would earn a living or survive. There were no artists in the family, let alone anyone who was university educated. It was a very new and different outlook.

So I did my A Levels, then applied for a foundation course in Manchester, and then a degree at Falmouth School of Art, which at the time was a very highly sought-after school. It was one of the smallest in the country.

Lucy: It has produced a lot of great artists.

Tim: It did, yes. My contemporaries were Tacita Dean and Hew Locke. Yes, it has produced a lot. I think we saw the end of the golden age of art education. We had a lot of space, although we complained about it. We had an untold amount of materials and facilities, technical facilities too. There were a lot of tutors. In those days tutors often had their own studios in the art school, so they would go off and do their own work there.

Lucy: But you went into conservation for a while, my own field. What took you in that direction? Was it just paying the bills?

Tim: Yes, entirely. I had a student exchange to Tours in France, and on the first night I remember walking around the centre of the town into a medieval square, Place Plumereau, and then turning another corner and seeing this massive cathedral. It was like being hit over the head with a wall of the past.

From that point I became really interested in medieval art and architecture. I visited many of the great cathedrals of England and got very into medieval music as well. When I left, I knew of someone involved in conservation and restoration in Bristol. I wrote to him, and I think I wrote three times. In the end he said, all right, come and visit me, which I did.

So I moved from Falmouth to Bristol. My first job was working on a Tudor tower, then a Neo-Palladian folly tower in Kent, then a crucifixion, and then a medieval pillar. Sorry, a Saxon church pillar near Chichester. But it wasn’t really where I was at. It paid the bills, and my boss was a great man. He had been involved in the restoration of Wells Cathedral.

Lucy: Amazing.

Tim: It wasn’t going down that path of stone carving and really immersing oneself in the restoration of art and architecture from the Middle Ages. It was more conservation, actually. To slow things down a bit.

Lucy: A different thing. It really is. People do not always understand, but it is quite a distinct thing, conservation.

Tim: Well, just to give an example of that. When Dick Marsh worked on Wells Cathedral, he used to tell stories where there would quite literally almost be fist fights about whether a statue should be conserved, which is slowing down the process of decay, or whether you should just chop off that arm that had eroded and put a nice, spanking new one on.

Lucy: Resculpt it, yes.

Tim: Resculpt it. I think Henry Moore had to come down and sort out the conflict that existed between the conservators and the restorers.

Lucy: It has become quite polarised. You still have both camps. And we are quite often called PACR, which is an accredited conservator-restorer. But I always think they should decide which one you are, because your approach for a client is completely different. It is confusing, because they are not similar at all.

Tim: No, no. I think if you have trained as a mason and you like carving…

Lucy: You want to sculpt.

Tim: You want to sculpt stone, yes. And whatever opportunity comes your way. But if you are a conservator, well, it is a very different thing.

Wax On Wax Off : How To Care For Bronze Sculpture
Branch, Lucy

 

© Nigel Hall, view of maquette in studio 2022

Lucy: Do you get drawn into a subject and follow it, or do you have sketchbooks or ideas books full of things you return to? Or is it something that captures you and you think, I am going to go deep on this?

Tim: It is funny you mention sketchbooks. If only I could keep sketchbooks. If only. I remember even at A Level and foundation, everybody talked about sketchbooks. Tutors would say you must do your sketchbooks, let me see your sketchbooks. I have always felt that the sketchbook exists in my head. It is not that I do not draw, I do, but I do not have loads of sketchbooks in the way some artists do. Their studios are piled high with them and I am quite envious of that.

Lucy: Yes. It is not your way.

Tim: Because you look at them and they are bristling with energy and ideas. Sometimes I draw things out, but generally the idea is in my head and it gets made. At the moment I have just started a new body of work. They begin as small wax maquettes and build from there. Maybe those are my sketchbooks.

Lucy: Absolutely. It is just that sketchbooks or idea books feel like that very art-school mode of capturing something. I remember talking to Ray Lonsdale and he said everyone wanted to see sketches when he went into a meeting. He found it boring, and he said the minute he created multiple versions of something, he went off the idea completely. So he stopped doing it.

One of the things I really love about your work is the emotional quality of it. There is an emotional language there. It does not matter what topic you are dealing with, there is this theme that you are very eloquent. Is that something that just comes out naturally in your sculpture, or are you someone who is comfortable talking about emotional subjects? I find that very hard.

Tim: Yes, I think it grips me, but I also find it hard to talk about. To bare one’s emotions. People of my age, maybe older or a bit younger, grew up in a time of the stiff upper lip. Get a grip of yourself. And generally that is how it was.

It sounds controversial, and I am thinking aloud, but what do we do with all these emotions? In some ways I prefer to drive them into something sculptural, or into writing, or…

Lucy: Painting.

Tim: Yes.

Lucy: But I will tell you, writing something that contains emotion is probably the hardest thing for me. Do you find that easy, or is it difficult no matter the medium?

Tim: In sculpture it comes easily. If we go back to that day walking past the bookshop window in Enniskillen, peering in and seeing the book on Rodin, opening it, buying it, and looking at The Burghers of Calais, seeing deep emotion expressed through clay and bronze, it opened the sluice gates for me. It allowed me to work in that way too.

So that makes me contradict myself. Emotions do count, I guess.

Lucy: Of course they do.

Tim: Yes, of course they do. But I suppose letting them distil through the art gives them greater weight. You can consider them again and again as you work through it. Hopefully, at the end, there is some sense.

Lucy: Is it ever hard to go into the studio? I mean, you are dealing with some quite heavy topics in your work. Not that art of any kind is ever easy, I don’t think. Does it ever make it hard to go in and crack on?

Tim: No. No, it doesn’t. Not at all. I don’t know why, but it doesn’t. And I know some of the subject matter I deal with is pretty heavy going, but I just get on and do it.

Lucy: Yeah. And what is the best bit for you? Is it the beginning, or the end when you get paid? I don’t know which is the best bit.

Tim: If you get paid.

Lucy: Yes.

Tim: I guess the beginning can be interesting. The middle bit can feel like a plateau, sometimes very uninteresting. And then the end, when it all comes together. If it is a good piece of work, it can give you something back.

Lucy: Are you ever satisfied with them?

Tim: No.

Lucy: It is never good enough.

Tim: If it is, it does not last for long.

Lucy: Okay.

Tim: In the great eternity of things, if you like, there is always that angle you see, or that feeling that you could have done this or that.

Lucy: Should have done it slightly differently.

Tim: This way or that way.

Lucy: Yeah.

Tim: You never quite get there.

Lucy: Yes.

Tim: The thing you are trying to get to is always just a little bit beyond your grasp, which makes you..

Lucy: Want to carry on, right?

Tim: Yes, it does. Yes.

© Nigel Hall – Chinese Whispers IV, 2008, Private Collection

Lucy: So how is work coming to you now? Are you in a situation where you are just creating what you want, or are you getting a lot of commissions?

Tim: I am not getting a lot of commissions. I have arranged my life so that I can work most of the time on things I want and need to work on. Through bodies of work that then get shown and, hopefully, sold. That is generally how it works. Sometimes I have been commissioned. The large piece at the Eden Project was a commissioned piece. The drummer in Truro was commissioned by Cornwall Council, and others. But much of the time it is about ideas, creating them, and then showing the work and hoping it sells.

Lucy: And what about public works? Are you keen to do more of them?

Tim: I would like to, yes.

Lucy: It is a very different type of art, in the sense that you are very theatrical in the studio. You control the entire environment and the feeling around the art, whereas outdoors you have none of that control.

Tim: Yes. It is beyond your control, absolutely.

Lucy: And…?

Tim: I can cite an example of that. I remember with The Drummer in Truro, one night I was doing the lighting and this group of five people came up to the statue and started to do something very impolite to it. One of the girls said, it is absolutely fine, it is our statue, we can do what we want.

I had not said anything, but I remember thinking I should. One of the men said, no, you cannot do that to the statue. And somebody replied, it is ours, we can do what we want. I remember thinking, well it is not mine, I suppose.

Lucy: Well, no, but there is etiquette, isn’t there? There is etiquette.

Tim: And there are laws that protect them as well. Yes. So yes, absolutely.

Lucy: But it is a bit more of a wild west environment that your piece is going into, that is for sure. And actually, people tend to remember their public artworks more often because of the things they have done around them, rather than how they might behave in a gallery where they are on their best behaviour. That interaction often makes the artwork mean something to them. So perhaps that is all right. I do not know.

Tim: Yes.

Lucy: Well, can you tell everyone where they might be able to find out more about you if they would like to?

Tim: Yes. You can go to my websites. My project website is timshawsculptor.com and there is also timshaweditions.com. On Instagram it is @timshawsculptor. And the public pieces you will be able to encounter, the latest is at the Imperial War Museum North in Salford. There is a large sculpture called Man on Fire.

Lucy: Oh yes, which has just won the PSSA award, hasn’t it?

Tim: Yes, it has won the PSSA Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture.

Lucy: It is a really fantastic piece. It is incredible. I have not seen it in person yet, but I will be going. That is the kind of thing I do with my holidays, go and look at sculpture that I am not working on.

Tim: Yes. Well, that particular piece, creating it was psychologically not easy. And physically creating it was very difficult, and casting it even more difficult. Getting it through the whole process and into the public eye took a great effort from many people.

Lucy: I am quite surprised to hear that actually, because to me it looks like something that needs to be out there. It looks like something that has something to say, and it does.

Tim: Yes. I think when it landed, I took a photograph from the second floor of the museum. A young couple walked by it and one of them must have said something, because they stepped back, looked at it again, then came around and looked at the head. The face was modelled upside down, because the figure is bent over. I spent a long time on that face. I had to dig deep into references of what it might be like for a person in that situation, burning alive.

I wanted people to stop and look and think about the horror of war. And the horror of war in faraway places too. Manchester, of course, has experienced the horror of terrorism, as London and many other cities have.

Lucy: Absolutely. And I think anything that inspires that sort of emotion in people, maybe that is what local councils are frightened of. They can often be quite safe in what they choose.

Tim: Well, it is difficult. Public art is difficult, isn’t it? It is difficult to please everyone.

Lucy: You usually cannot. It is impossible.

Tim: And I should add, when I was talking about terrorism, I am not forgetting where I grew up. In Northern Ireland, where everyone experienced that for decades. Back to public art and how it is perceived, it is a very difficult thing. But usually what happens is that something lands, and it might land with a bit of controversy, and then the public starts to own it psychologically. They want to keep it there. It becomes part of them and part of the town’s identity.

If you remember the Angel of the North when it first arrived, there were quite a few headlines.

Lucy: Absolutely.

Tim: But now people are proud of it. It is part of its existence.

Lucy: Yeah. I absolutely agree with that. I think it takes time. Even when you move things around in your own home, it takes a while to get used to something. And if you put something new outside, an artwork particularly, something people have never encountered, it inevitably takes a while for people to get used to it and to feel it and understand it. The more they return to it, the more they tend to like it. But often the instant reaction is, oh, that should not be there.

Tim: Yeah.

Lucy: So you cannot win. Human psychology is against you in that initial reaction to it.

Tim: Well, it is a big thing, isn’t it, to put something in a public space that is going to be there. It changes things. Maybe not forever, but for years. If it is a permanent public artwork, that is a big shift for a place and for the people walking past it.

Lucy: Yeah, it absolutely is. And also because the material is difficult, it is not necessarily a comfortable change. Anything that makes you think can be quite hard. I find with teenagers it is particularly difficult just getting them to think for a minute before reacting. But that is the great thing about public art. It will interact with all generations, all types of people, including those who might not normally look at art. They will look at your piece because they walk past it. It is thrust into their life and hopefully doing its job.

It is easy to say things that happen far away do not touch you, that they have nothing to do with you. But actually you are bringing it home for them.

Tim: Yes. Well, fire it is difficult, isn’t it?

Lucy: Yes. A person on fire. It is a great piece.

Tim: Thank you.

Lucy: Thank you very much for joining us today. I really appreciate that.

Tim: Lovely to talk to you, Lucy, and thank you very much for asking.

© Nigel Hall – Desert Rose, 1986-91, Canary Wharf

Lucy: I loved Tim’s story. I think the idea that Mark Glazebrook of the Albemarle Gallery saw something in him and was prepared to write him a cheque without asking anything in return is a moment of pure belief in Tim and his potential. I think it gave him permission to fully commit to being a sculptor.

It is a funny moment, things like that. It is wonderful for Tim, but it also makes me a little sad, because words of encouragement are so important and they are free. They are easily given, but somehow they do not carry the same weight as money, and I hate that.

There is some kind of validation we get from money that we do not get anywhere else. And yet sometimes work is valid without the money. What if that moment had not happened? I am sure he would have found another way. He is so talented. But sometimes you need resources. You need to pay the bills. You cannot just wildly chase your creative impulses. Even if you think you are good enough, you cannot go there if you cannot pay the bills.

So we all need a Mark Glazebrook in our lives. But what if we do not get one? It makes me worry about all those wonderfully talented artists who never receive that validation and who do not go on to make it professionally because they did not get it at the moment they needed it.

Tim has created an autonomous life for himself. He has deliberately structured his career so he can work on the things he truly wants to work on, rather than chasing commissions. He creates bodies of work for exhibitions and then sells them, which is the absolute ideal. And I want to note that, in some ways, the way he has created his life around his art is a kind of holy grail. It is a creation of its own.

I am not saying it was easy. He will have made sacrifices and difficult decisions. I imagine he has gone through tough times. But aiming for that way of working, keeping it front and centre, has worked out for him. Certainly.

The road less travelled, but it has worked. And so maybe we sometimes need that level of belief in ourselves to really design our lives like that.

I thought it was interesting that he said he is never a hundred percent satisfied with his work. He sometimes says he is, but maybe it does not last too long. And it is that dissatisfaction that drives him forward rather than paralysing him. He is reaching for the next thing, just a little bit beyond his grasp. It is interesting that it is not only the carrot that encourages us to move forward. Sometimes it is our own stick hitting us that does it too.

Please take the time to look at Tim’s work. In the next couple of weeks there will be the transcription of the episode on the sculpturevulture.co.uk website. Under “Podcast” there are always the blog posts, which are the transcriptions, but they also have the articles illustrated with the sculptor’s work. You can always search the artists on Google too. They are amazing, but I do encourage you to look at the website. I think it really works with the images as well.

Sometimes audio is very quick and you do not get all the really good bits that some of the artists say, and the wisdom. So yes, do check it out when you have some time.

I am going to ask you to support the show in a very special way this week. As you know, I have another novel due to launch, and this is the first novel I have ever written that is a historical romance. I usually write about mysteries and the dark side of the art world. Sculpture is always at the centre of the story. But this is a bit different.

I was inspired by a historical moment rather than a specific sculpture. There is an artist in the story, very central to it, a great colourful character, but it is not all about art this time. It is about the restrictions on women in the seventeenth century, how marriage is really the only route young women had to be respectable. This story looks at a character who thinks outside the box and wonders whether there is another way for her to live her life in this period.

It is all about ambition. It is all about desire. It is all about choices.

This may not be the kind of novel that you particularly like, but you may know someone who enjoys historical romances, and I am looking for reviewers. I have not got a street team, which I usually do. Street teams are something that authors have, who review early for them so that other readers can get a sense of what the book is like. I have not got a street team for historical romance.

So I am going to be setting the book to be free in the week of the 17th of November, and I am encouraging people to contact me at lucia@antiquebronze.co.uk if they would like a notification that the book has gone free. Hopefully they will enjoy it and read it.

If you know anybody that likes historical romance, please send them in my direction. Send me their details so that I can make sure they get a link to the free copy, and then hopefully they will read and review it. It really helps the algorithm. It helps writers launch, because you need a bit of pizazz at the beginning of a book’s life and then you start to promote it. But it is incredibly difficult to promote without reviews.

So, if you know anyone, tell your Aunt Mildred she needs to read my book. It would be much appreciated.

I will look forward to speaking to you in a couple of weeks. If you do not know anyone who likes historical romance, then instead send me a picture of a sculpture that has inspired you.

© Nigel Hall, Kiss, 2000. Canary Wharf

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