henrietta bud

A sculpture is much more than an image operating at a visual level. It also acts on our sense of touch and in a peculiarly physically way, through shape itself. My fascination is with how sculptural form, and the space around and within a shape, can generate a powerful presence and how this communicates and resonates with people. Coming from a medical background, I also believe that this communication can be healing.

I trace my feeling for sculpture to a childhood spent surrounded by the majestic forms of the Dorset coastline and the slow absorption of the knowledge that these forms are continually acted upon and shaped by the weather and sea.
Although seemingly static, the cliffs exist in a dynamic state where exposure jostles with concealment and this understanding communicates wordlessly somewhere deep within us. Perhaps in a small way one can capture something of this in a sculpture and I’d like to think that the understanding of it sometimes comes out in my work, particularly when I am carving, which I do slowly with hand tools.

Communication through sculpture operates on many levels and I like to explore this. Sometimes it’s intellectual, sometimes emotional. To this end, I work both figuratively and non-figuratively. I am also motivated to make sculpture by the pure enjoyment of making and the alchemy of turning raw material into new forms and shapes. I enjoy working with different materials so my pieces are very varied. They also tend to be unusual and are often unique, one-off works.