I had always admired Brancusi and liked some of Moore’s work but began to be drawn to Cycladic art and then the neolithic grave sculptures of Central Europe, in particular those from Hamangia on the Black Sea coast of Rumania, which deal with death and regeneration and the Great Goddess.

These forms took me a good deal further back than the conventional myths of the Greeks and the Romans or even Genesis which informed my schooldays. But then I was also taught as a scientific fact that the atom could not be split and that man was descended from the apes……

So it is that the mythic explanations for man’s existence on Earth, exemplified in his worship of woman that is found in all the old civilisations as goddesses, is the part of our history that motivates my work. The forms connected with birth, the forms of living things, the rituals surrounding death and regeneration informed by the everlasting core, natural form, which is a universal language understood by all.