A Seaside Beauty from 1981.
A dear friend just let me know she found my ‘Seaside Beauty ‘ at auction in the cotswolds.
After studying sculpture at Art College and finishing a degree at Cheltenham , we settled down in Gloucestershire , and remained in the county while Charles Watts, now sadly departed , completed his course and went onto the Royal College of Art for two years.
At that time, I had become interested in the process of using Papier mache for three dimensional sculptures, after I discovered the material had been used to make carriages drawn by horses , not just the more familiar items we associate with that material , like trays and boxes . So it had to be durable ! It was also a medium that didnt require expensive kilns and kit or great physical strength, so ideal for me .
I bought an old second had washing machine at a local auction and set it up in one of the lean to outhouses. It was a top loader with an agitator like this one above . I adapted it a bit, and would plug it in, add hot water and news paper, turn the dial to a washing cycle and bingo . The resulting sludge was sieved and mixed with adhesive. It turned out to be a very flexible material , good for sculpting and shaping around an armature , which I attached to a wooden base.
Each one was build by hand , the making process was quite long, adding layers which required intermittent drying , then I would apply more until I was content with the shape, before finally adding a skin of thin tissue over the top of it all. Once fully dry I could bring each one to life with colourful painting and a final coat of varnish , it was at this point their real characters emerged .
I made quite a number of these figures in the 1980’s, sometimes adding real adornments . They all portray jolly moments , sometimes of people I had seen or experiences I’d had . Many sold at that time through Rooksmoor Mills near Stroud and other local Galleries .
Sometimes these figures didn’t fair well. I heard that , during a couples divorce the wife had hurled one of these sculptures at her husband, which fortunately for him missed and hit a wall , but of course that didnt do the sculpture a lot of good . Others I made have faired better, like this Seaside beauty , which seems in pretty good shape for its age . She doesn’t look like she is going to break the bank, and can be found at John Rolfe Auctions Tetbury . This sale is on 9th November 2025.