“I grew up with sculpture in my life as my oldest friend’s father, Alan Ingham, was a sculptor. (Alan was Henry Moore’s assistant for four years in the early 1950s and when he came back from the UK he worked with Tom Bass for a while.) Alan’s studio and bronze foundry were down the back of the bush block in Newport where my friend Jane and I grew up. We were always visiting Alan in the studio…”

“The experience was deeply immersive and intense with the sounds of marble being mined and occasionally pushed down the hillside serving as a backdrop while they were carving…”

“Sculpting has been on my radar since I created my major work for year twelve in high school, ‘Lady in the hammock’. There was a gap from then until Tom Bass Sculpture Studio School became an essential part of my week about 7 years ago…”

“Sculpting is an amazing outlet to release stress, and once that goes, the creativity seems to come. I love the feeling of immersion and freedom that you get when you’re carving a piece of stone. It’s physically demanding, tactile and earthy... and in the end you get a three dimensional object that will hopefully bring joy to someone…”

Last month, we were very glad to welcome back Georgina Mills, a figurative realist sculptor and TBSSS guest teacher from Tarntanya/Adelaide, to run two ¾ Life-Size Torso Workshops. We spoke with two of the students who participated about their experience.

“I recently had the absolute pleasure of taking part in Michael Vaynman’s 2 Day Wax Workshop, and it was honestly just what I needed…”

“As Anni Albers said: “art is something that makes you breathe with a different kind of happiness.” I’ve never done any kind of studio art before, so sculpting is a new kind of happiness for me. I love the challenge of drawing from the right side of my brain for a change… though I still cannot follow map directions…”

“I had an epiphany last year when I suddenly realised that I was creating stone sculptures in my drawings... and that I really should be exploring real sculpture... with real stone. It’s already given me an invaluable insight into the genius of past sculptors from primitive ‘stone age’ carvers to the renaissance…”

“I first fell in love with sculpting when I visited Musée Rodin in Paris in 2019. I was mesmerised by the manipulation of form and material to capture the intricacies of human life and emotion…”

“It is only of late that I have grasped why it has always been so important to me: in fact when I mould, sculpt or shape a material, whether it be clay, stone, felt, glass or whichever, I become energetically and emotionally balanced…”

“I love the escapism you get when creating something. I have been creative since I was a child, always making things…”

I was fascinated by how a sculpture could stop me in my tracks and make me physically move around it whilst the surroundings faded into the background…

“Art tells a story. It tells a story of hope, of suffering, of sadness, of happiness. All my art tells a story. The beauty of art is that it lives on long after you die…”

“In 2015 I took a life gamble and applied to the Florence Academy of Art. I was accepted so I moved to Florence, Italy to start learning how to sculpt the figure…”

“I’ve been working with my hands everyday for the last 15 years and have always enjoyed creating things, so making sculptures just seemed like an inevitable path to explore…”

“After my first term at TBSSS I was hooked and booked in for each term after that…”

“I was drawn to sculpting as a form of tactile, creative expression…”