TOLLE LEGE – ST AUGUSTINE AND A LOBSTER IN BED.
Lime wood carving, church kneeler, ledger.
1.7 x 1.2 x 1.2 metres.
2025
I had the idea to make a carving of St Augustine in bed with a lobster from a drawing I did on the coach to London.
The original drawing.
360 degree view (sorry if this gives you motion sickness)
There was a ledger on the bed that visitors to the gallery were welcome to look through, to leave open at a random page. In my mind, the contents of the ledger became an all encompassing repository of knowledge relating to everything that had ever happened, or everything that was ever going to happen. That is because I worked on the thing for 6 months from 7 in the evening until 3 in the morning every day. I did not stop until the work had poured out of me. I look at it now at some remove. I was really inside the project.
I had put an asking price of £27,000 on the piece, during the show, sort of as a joke, but mainly referring to the cost of a degree in the current market. Subsequently I have sold the fingers on the right hand of the sculpture as Christmas decorations and have sawn the sheet into a square, to make a model of Kelston Round Hill for a forthcoming work. I also made a dog's head for the Saint because I saw St Christopher when I was working on the Hole in the Water project and it seemed like a good idea at the time, but after glueing on about a thousand individual hairs on the dog head, began to think that it was not.