A cantina full of wine making things begged to be made into something. Aldo, the previous owner of the house, had died 8 years before we bought it. The house had been subsequently used for family parties – the dining room can easily seat 25, with a spectacular view across the mountain valley. Aldo was apparently extremely convivial, unmarried and seldom without a glass of wine in his hand – a Ligurian Bacchus. The party must continue, with the possibility of working towards an installation with the Dionysian Gio Gatto in Turin, the theme had to be wine.
I am an art history graduate from the Courtauld Institute in London, so have a knowledge of the classical themes that dominated secular art of the 16th to 18th centuries. Titian and Poussin’s bacchanalian masterpieces are inevitably influential. When I descided to drop academia to become an artist, I chose to be a figurative artist when nobody was studying the human figure in art schools, or making figurative art. I had the life model largely to myself, and set out on a classically inspired course of making figurative sculpture, developing a technique that constructed human and animal forms out of curved pieces of wood to evoke musculature and movement.
Wine barrels, when disassembled, are metal circles and curved woodenwine-stained staves – ideal for making a procession of drunken bacchantes. Beautiful green glass demijohns, old bottles, labelled and unlabelled – just so inspiring!
The resulting outpouring of work is here.
