WHAT’S IT LIKE TO…
Against a backdrop of pandemic anxiety, Lucy White found herself an unusual retreat: a sculptor’s studio. There, sitting very still, she saw herself transformed into clay – and faced up to a few midlife insecurities.
Sit for a sculptor as a life model? Lucy White is surprised by the solace and peace
It’s late 2020 and Ireland is between lockdowns. I’m sat statue-still on a stool in an artist’s studio festooned with curiosities: pen drawings of phantasmagorical figures, bronze and plaster busts, a dusty old chemist’s cabinet, a full length human skeleton with a black rose in its mouth and a (living and breathing) cat called Ophelia. My mind eventually settles on the year that saw banana bread, sourdough and sea swimming trending, and when arts and crafts went primetime: on Channel 4, Grayson Perry invited viewers to submit artworks each week, while new audiences discovered Sky Arts’ Portrait of the Year/Week, the BBC’s sewing bee and even a pottery throwdown. Fine art suddenly became inclusive and handicrafts no longer the preserve of patchouli-scented cat ladies.
But regardless of whether they’re a lockdown phase or a mainstay, it won’t change Alan Clarke’s practice one jot.
Art and design is in his blood – his father is a silversmith – and as well as drawing and sculpting, he teaches at NCAD (he’s also the official Ross O’Carroll-Kelly illustrator, splitting his time between studios in Dublin 8 and Wicklow). Last summer he received funding from the Arts Council to sculpt three models, putting a call out on social media for applications. Hence I am now sequestered in D8 – far, far from the madding Covid – while Clarke slowly but surely transforms a ball of clay into a mirror image of my head, as if by magic.
Here, silence is literally golden. White walls transform from glacial blue to sun-kissed and back again, in the blink of an eye, Mother Nature applying her broad brushstrokes through the skylight. I’m not sure what is burning more – the twinge starting in my lower back or the eyes of plaster heads on shelves boring into me – and yet these sedentary, socially distanced sessions, punctuated with random flurries of conversation, feel like a gift. It sure beats doomscrolling.
Phone off for three hours at a time and with nothing to read or binge-watch, I oscillate between daydreaming and a sort of clearheaded trance, scuffs on the wall the only anchors to my rested gaze, steady breath and boundless trains of thought. That’s not to say
I’m not nervous of seeing my likeness evolve. Looking in the mirror is one thing and seeing yourself in 3D is quite another.
Fortunately, you don’t have to have the cut-glass cheekbones of Michaela Coel or Cillian Murphy to be an artist’s model; although, in fairness, they would both make exquisite busts
– in plasticine, never mind in bronze. “People with good bone structure will generally make good sculptures – high, pronounced cheekbones, strong chin, strong brow, etc,” concedes Clarke, “but I think more importantly is a face with lots of character, and that’s a quality that can be hard to pin down because a trait that gives one person character might not do the same for the next person.” When asked which famous person he would most like to sculpt, he says Rasputin.
I have neither the Russian’s piercing eyes or (thankfully) shaggy beard, but a weak chin, slackened jawline and jowls – which means parking my ego at the door. It’s the sculptor’s duty to represent, not distort, reality, unlike in paintings, drawings or photographs, when the artist can take flattering liberties (and also do the polar opposite: see the unflinching paintings of Freud, Bacon, Saville). There’s nowhere to hide with figurative sculpture, making it all the more reason to respond to Clarke’s open call.
Middle aged women have spent centuries usurped by their younger counterparts in oil paintings, photography and cinema. And in the 21st century, you’re damned if you do or don’t have fillers (I don’t). Same with Instagram filters, Photoshop and so on: we’ve become so manipulated by multimedia – in every sense – that our own self-image, and therefore our self-worth, has become irreversibly distorted. I felt it was healthier, then, to not only confront my midlife self, but commemorate it in a monumental material. And with lockdown hair! Put that in your pipe and smoke it, patriarchy.
While confronting one’s own 360-degree image is challenging, Clarke does all the actual graft. His process starts with a tight ball of paper on a rudimentary wooden armature on to which pieces of clay are diligently layered, shaped and refined over time. “Sculpting in clay is essentially drawing in three dimensions,” he says, acknowledging that his sculptures are