Rebellion

I was commissioned by Standard Life to create two sculptures of horses for one of their building projects in the City of London. I was awarded the Royal Society of Sculptors Medal for Outstanding Sculpture in London for the piece. They were originally planned to be placed in an internal atrium, but the building was changed and so I had to redesign for one horse to go outside on top of the building.

The scale of this project took considerably more time than planned due to alterations to the project and contracts (a year to negotiate) and hence overall took over three years to complete from start to finish including casting. There were constraints put on me, for example, the weight limit of three tons for the top of the building, what the horse was doing there and how it looked. I started with small paper cutouts to work out the size of the horse that we could put there in scale with the size of the building. From drawings I made small scale card models to see if the size to scale looked right and then progressed to larger scale maquette which finally, once approved I scaled up to the full size which equated to a twice life size magnificent horse. From paper to bronze this took 14 months including the clay original which required four months of work applying three tons of clay by hand on top of three tons of armature (metal skeleton).

The story behind the horse: I based the horses on the strongly built horses of Trojan Romano style, because he was going to be 100 feet up and size was extremely important. He is rearing and ‘breaking free from the building’, his feet are embedded in what looks like the blocks of the building with other horses heads emerging from the top of the building. He is rebelling against being on the top of a building and leading the others to freedom.

He was unveiled in Trafalgar Square on the anniversary of when Nelson was first seen at ground level before being elevated to his lofty perch with the pigeons, high above the crowds. The same is true of Rebellion; he was not to be seen at ground level again.  I was the first living artist to have a piece exhibited in a prominent place in Trafalgar Square since Nelson’s Column.

Rebellion was cast by Pangolin Editions Foundry, Stroud, Gloucestershire.