Term and Protrusion are two instalments in my ongoing project of self-portraiture.

With its primary celebration of the heroic ‘exceptional individual’, the portrait bust may be considered the Post-Enlightenment artform par excellence. Formally, these works use the portrait as the intersecting point for a visceral realism and the cold materiality of neoclassical marble. The resulting hybridised bodily fragments leave the heroic behind, placing the bust within a realm of ‘casualty’ or damage.

On one hand these works make a feature of the problems particular to figurative sculpture – the ‘edit’ and sculpture’s internal space – but when these brutal alterations are made visceral they express more than mere stylistic convention. The violence done to the body in sculptural composition can be see as a metaphor for both the male relationship with the body, and a contemporary assault on humanism and its associated values.