Anna Gillespie United Kingdom

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I am a figurative sculptor working in the UK with gallery representation but now branching out into collaborative and site specific work. I use life casting to play along the spectrum of abstraction and figuration, often working in plaster and seeking ways of representing the human form that find beauty in the unusual or rarely appreciated. I also work in bronze both on a large and small scale.

In the last two years a new body of work – perhaps best described as biomorphic – has arisen through my fascination with life-casting. In these news forms I am continuing my decades long, tentative approach towards a less literal re-presentation of the body, attempting to capture inner experience as opposed to outer appearance whilst still holding fast to my original awe of the real physicality of the human body in all the various forms of beauty it takes.

Ironically perhaps, part of this desire to capture felt experience rather than observed appearance, seems to involve the ‘accuracy’ of representation and detail that body casting allows. The lived experience of wrinkles and pores, creases and rolls, tissue and joints is captured in fascinating detail by alginate and then the resulting white plaster casts, or transmuted once again through machine-like graphite grey. The ‘classical’ result is somehow pleasingly at odds with the brutal reality of our imperfect bodies, especially as they age. This unforgiving imprint is essential to the felt experience of being in a body and the inescapability of our fundamental embodied and limited existence as humans.

In some senses here I am working towards an environmental statement. We live in our limited bodies as we live on this finite planet and, despite our illusions, cannot escape into a purely limitless, digital world in which we can extract from at will and yet still hope to survive.

In the casts I am drawn to ‘mistakes’ as much as ‘perfection’, as I am in our human bodily existence. In a digital age of airbrushed images I hope to draw attention to unusual beauty, vulnerability and strength of the reality of our working bodies. I also enjoy the physicality of working in the studio – particularly at the moment with plaster – a traditional and humble material whose cheapness allows for experimentation and absorbs me totally as I work. I am also exploring more environmentally sustainable alternatives to plaster.