Michael James Talbot
1959, Staffordshire, England
“Sculpture for me, is essentially a theatrical construction, an attempt to show and illuminate a chosen moment in time. I draw my creative inspiration from theatre, myth, dance and illusion. The inspiration for the Briseis and Ariadne sculptures were taken from plumes of water in a night-lit fountain which, with the distortion of the mind’s eye, figures appeared in the tumbling crest of a column of liquid energy. This, I have tried to capture in bronze, through the lost wax process, a technique from Ancient Greece, to render a timeless human narrative from the Myth of Greece. I like to give my sculptures choreography of form, tension and balance to lead the eye and capture a moment in time, sometimes I work with the fragment form rather than an entire figure (like Harlequin and Primrose Path). This is a favourite artistic device often inspired by shadows of the model on the studio wall – because less is sometimes more.”