Bronze sculpture expert Vanessa Pooley talks to the RBS

A reluctant bronze sculpture expert
gives a talk...

Vanessa Pooley, a reluctant bronze sculpture expert

I suppose I must be a bronze sculpture expert, since I was elected a Fellow of the Royal British Society of Sculptors in 2003... but even so, in summer 2006, when I received the acceptance letter for their Sculpture Show I was aghast to see that it involved exhibitors giving a talk. I decided to wriggle out of it, but then the printed flyer arrived with my name on it and a date for my talk.

I told the RBS office I did not do talks. They gently suggested I think about it. I agreed, but was worried that I would make a fool of myself. The summer drew on, and although still anxious I came to terms with the fact that I ought to give the talk a go. I could keep it very, very short and still call it "a talk", couldn't I? Or show a load of slides of work with the odd title, and hope that would count.

November loomed. I made lists of slides and wondered what on earth to say. I submitted the images to the RBS office who made two thought-provoking suggestions: perhaps 40 slides was too many for 20 minutes? Maybe a long list of works plop, plop, plop was a little tedious?

I did some thinking. What did I want to say? What did the audience want to hear? Who on earth is the audience?

The evil day came, and I arrived with my newly edited CD of images. The staff, although busy, were supportive and encouraging, knowing that - bronze sculpture expert or not - I was still dreading the talk.

Giles Penny gave his talk before me and he was delightful - calm and funny. I noticed how warm and interested the huge audience was. Then my turn came. I quickly ignored all my prompt cards and just said what I wanted to say, starting by telling the audience that I hadn't wanted to give a talk at all! To my total surprise, they were warm and friendly to me, too, and it all went okay.

I'm very glad that I did the talk - and I actually enjoyed it! So thank you to the RBSS who have got me over a giant hurdle. Next time I'm asked to do a talk as a bronze sculpture expert, well yes, I might!

Here's an extract from my talk given to the Royal British Society of Sculptors on 22 November 2006 in the series of talks "18@ 108 – Sculptors on Sculpture".

"Sculpting is like cookery. I don't have a plan when I start work and just play with sausages of clay. It's the same as I do with my cooking - when I cook for adults I am comfy with, I rarely know what I'll end up with meal-wise. I just assemble different elements - saucy bits, topping bits, heavy bits, spicy bits, bland bits - until there's an 'Ah-hah!' moment, a 'that goes on that, and over that, and under the grill' moment...and the dishes are very much recognisable as my cooking. My work is the same.

I know my sculpture is very much my style and guess it always will be, but I try to do the same as with the cooking, so that there is less predictability, and a chance, however small, for some other element to creep in and surprise me.

I work by making separate shapes, then combining them, working on them, and then cutting them up after they have formed into a shape or flavour of their own, so as to put them together in a way which I hadn't foreseen.

More recently, I've been finding direct inspiration from outside sources. This can make work much faster to resolve, since the starting idea is often close to the resulting end sculpture.

Of course a lot of development goes on, however clear the starting point, but these new inspirations have brought me new ideas. The strongest of these was the work of the artist Anita Klein, which is fiercely autobiographical and relates her family life as it progresses. I used one of her prints, 'Leila's Birthday', as a starting point. It is as an image of Anita on her haunches, hugging her small daughter. This is where the inspiration for my first Mother and Child sculpture came from. In that sculpture I was really surprised that I could 'do' a child figure, and since then that idea has led to all the other Mother and Child sculptures that have followed.

Before I was a mother I never imagined I would make mother and child sculptures, because I would have thought the idea purely sentimental. I can still see that there is a sentimental side, and sometimes when working I worry about that. But I try very hard to do precisely the sort of work I want to do, and at the moment a large part of that involves exploring mother and child imagery."

A reluctant bronze sculpture expert gives a talk...

A reluctant bronze sculpture expert
gives a talk...