"'My Servant'" Sculpture

Disfigurines are a series of ceramic situations, that satirise and pervert the traditional cloying and romanticised life portrayed in figurines which have long jostled for space on tabletops and mantles the length and breadth of Britain. These mass-produced, often crudely manufactured figures of people and animals from a by-gone genteel age, where ladies take tea, couples play cards and young lovers steal kisses, are manipulated and subverted to portray a darker depiction of life. Cleansed for the most part of surface decoration and pattern they immediately lose the superficiality of charm and appeal. Model poses are re-appropriated and situations re-configured to construct a new Hogarthian representation of life in porcelain. Instead of a Victorian idyll they depict a counter reality of drug abuse, sexual perversion, suicide, murder, darkness of mind and other modern malaise.