Horse and Rider I - 2019 - Marble - 46 x 30 x 21cm (sold)

The horse and rider motif is something I come back to time and time again. Apart from its intrinsic significances outlined below it is also the place where I go to sculpturally chill for a while. I recreate here and explore something that’s familiar but ever tempting me to venture deeper. It’s a yardstick where I can measure myself against its challenges and like chess I feel that similarly regarded, each game will tell one much about one’s current state of mind. I thought years ago about saying goodbye to it as a subject, but now I know it is metronomic.

My first encounter with ‘Horse’ was when I was very young at the RDS summer show. Around about the stables there, a tanned excited immensity clopped about. I was no taller, it seemed at the time, than its knee. Whom I was with, or even had I a hand to hold, isn’t part of the memory just pure awe at its size power and beauty. That was the start of my infection. Its immensity and the intensity I experienced was something I haven’t encountered since then. What has evolved in the years since has manifested itself through exploring meaning, through connectedness to and isolation from, through a take by the rubber bandits and having a ‘horse outside’ as distinct from a Subaru or a Honda Civic and what that means, through a historical interest in how human civilisation evolved to the modern era over an interwoven existence spanning 6 millennia with Horse and what that has meant and why it happened at all; what is it, about humankind, that directed it so and not least that I got taller and with it a changing viewpoint that allowed more imported empathy and connectedness to a wider world and to self. Horse existed as a subject and as a prop. As a prop it allowed me to work with the figure where the horse below could disrupt the gravity for the figure above, balance etc.