Artist Statement (Camberwell Unit 3)

My research explores the notion of the monumental. This can mean size, weight, or the changing social contexts which give rise to both statues and statue-toppling. In an expanded sense, the term is concerned with what is choreographic, architectural, mnemonic, resistant, and anthropomorphic, in and about, sculpture today.

I begin with continually recording, through writing and drawing, what I personally find moving. I explore the objects, stories, actions and events which resonate with me and which I feel have potential to relate. I then re-work and re-enact them in the studio in an explorative way. 

Over the past year I have drawn on traditional processes including metalwork, bronze casting and enamelling to explore my subject. Presently, I favour polystyrene, cements, plasters, paints and steel components which I can intuitively and speculatively manipulate with simple tools. Interaction with found objects has been present throughout.

The current moment calls for personal and fragmentary artistic responses over a search for universal truths. To explore this, I use the notion of the autoethnographic; that my inevitable bound-up-ness with the practice and work is both an activating factor and a quality which is available and pointed to, and thus open to critique. This has opened the door to performance methods using my own body, but proceeds from within the field of sculpture.

Despite wider reading around my subject, I produce work which is personal and distinct, informed by material process and working life.

Owen Herbert, London, November 2024