Appendage No. 8
Hercules Study for Hercules Meets GalateaEdition 7 of 10
Hand cast & finished in pigmented Jesmonite
300 x 250 x 300mm
Accompanied by a numbered and signed certificate
About the Edition
As with all these monthly Appendage's No.8 derives from a larger work which, in this case, is Hercules Meets Galatea. Originally conceived for an exhibition at Herald St, London in 2014 both Greco-Roman figures, historically made in marble, were manufactured this time in polystyrene ... a similarly shimmery but deliberately more debased contemporary equivalent! Now, nearly 10 years later, I have finally had the opportunity to translate these in to bronze ... although all the bobbly polystyrene detail is of course retained forensically.
Hercules was crudely hand-carved out of 1" polystyrene profiles using an old bread knife, trying to mimic the methods of a 3D printer as I built him up layer by layer. Galatea was outsourced to a car prototyping plant where they modelled what I asked to be a median female and then CNC lathed her in polystyrene.
While the work has David and Goliath connotations with a life-size Galatea staring down a Hercules scaled to match his monumental Farnese forebear, the work was always conceived more as an inquiry in to sculpture than classical mythology. It asks what our role or purpose might be as sculptors in the digital era ... when anything can be conjured at the press of a button?
My questions then were around spirit and potency ... can a digitally manufactured version of an iconic sculpture, hewn in polystyrene, still muster the same potency and charge as it's classical counterpart? I was interested then, and still am now, in trying to fathom which attributes elicit spirit, aura and charge - is it scale, portrayal, material or manufacture ... and is there still a role for us, as sculptors, against this digital backdrop?