Monthly Archives: March 2013

Living Seas Exhibition

The Wildlife Trusts Undersea Art Award was set up in 2007 thanks to the vision of Peter Tinsley from Dorset WT. Since then 5 artists have been given the opportunity to learn to dive and then make work from the experience of diving off the UK coast. I was lucky enough to be the latest recipient of the award and I had an amazing time seeing marine life up close and in their element off the North Norfolk coast. See my blog about the bursary here.

To celebrate the Undersea Art Award and help highlight the need for Marine Conservation Zones (MCZs) to be designated examples of work from all five artists (Kim Atkinson, Antonia Philips, Anna Kirk-Smith, Esther Tyson and me) is on show at Chesil Beach in Dorset until March 27th. Click here for more information.

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PLEASE DO YOUR BIT TO HELP THE MARINE HABITAT OFF OUR COASTS

127 MCZs were recommended by the stakeholder groups, supported by the MCZ Science Advisory Panel and Natural England, the Government nature conservation advisors. The Government’s current public consultation is proposing to designate this year just 31 of the 127, and it gives no real commitment to designating the remainder. We need a whole network of protected areas as nursery beds for fish and other marine life and 31 sites does not make a network.

The consultation closes at midnight on Easter Sunday, 31st March.
It is easy to respond as the Wildlife Trusts have produced a simple click-and-send campaign response. Click here to support the MCZs.

Patch the Terrier

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I was asked to make a sculpture of a particular dog for a client. Patch is a fox terrier who should have flopped over ears but hers decided to ping up. It gives her a charm all of her own but meant it was actually a rather tricky sculpture to get right as the ears seemed very large. As the client had commissioned it as a surprise joint birthday present for friends it was impossible for me to meet Patch in person so I had to rely on photographs and looking at her conventionally eared daughter Pickle who belongs to my client.

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The sculpture actually took a long time as I got bogged down in the detail and had to slim down the face to capture the distinctive muzzle of the breed. One ear is based around a small builder’s trowel and the other has part of a rotavater blade among other things. I managed to allude to the splodge on her body, hence the name Patch, by using cogs from egg whisks. The characteristic stance and feeling of her being ‘ready for anything’ worked well and is typical terrier. Some may say that my attention to detail went a little too far as I could not resist putting the strategically placed nut at the base of the tail.

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