38 x 15 x 10 cms

Paper, aluminium foil, masking tape and cloth tape. 2015

This piece took as it’s starting point drawings of a Baboon skull that I had done at the Grant Museum of Zoology, University College London. The intention was to create a three dimensional drawing using the stark contrast of white and black tape. The core was constructed of folded paper sheets compacted and bound with masking tape to block out the main forms. Compacted aluminium foil was used around the eye sockets and teeth for finer modelling near the surface. White cloth tape was used to bind around the entire piece, then black cloth tape cut into various widths was applied over the white surface. In this way the black tape was used to ‘draw’ around the entire form and define some of the features such as teeth and nasal cavity. This created the graphic sensation of mark making on a surface, but with a physical medium that could also turn around a form. I wanted to create a balance between observed form and an abstraction of the individual features such as the teeth, some of which are only suggested by simplified squares. The bound element of the sculpture also evokes mummified animals from Ancient Egypt, which have been an important source of inspiration in my recent work.