In January 2024 I visited the Lake District for the first time, where I encountered the beautiful yet hardy Herdwick sheep peacefully grazing on the mountains. I was captivated by their unique grey coats and history. They were brought to the Lake District by the Vikings in the 10th Century and have since made it their exclusive home.

After visiting and connecting with the local sheep farms, I now officially source my Herdwick wool directly from them. However, since there are generally fewer Herdwick sheep around, they are only shorn once a year and I can only use a specific quality of wool for my work - I expect that I'll be limited in the number of grey wool sculptures I can produce compared to my Merino pieces.

Herdwick wool is a lovely blend of natural colours: white, light grey, dark grey, and black, and contains a combination of soft and rough textures. Its density opened up a range of possibilities for me as a sculptor to create seemingly soft yet structured forms. The colour gives the works a wild, dark aesthetic, which is quite different from my Merino pieces.

Herdwick sheep

While creating 'Eidos', I was inspired by documentaries about extraterrestrial life and books on fungi in space. I learned that thousands of meteorites hit planet Earth every year, and scientists hypothesize that the extraterrestrial material carried down by these meteorites may have impacted the development of our early DNA. We like to think that Earth is a little protected island shielded from everything else in our solar system, mutating and changing independently. But that's unlikely to be true. The evolution of life on our planet is not linear and is still much debated among scientists.

The word 'Eidos' comes from Greek and means "form" or "species". It is my interpretation of a birthing pod created by Mother Nature uniting with an Alien Entity. The shape was inspired by the 'galls' found on tree trunks, which are caused by insect feeding or egg laying. The dark essence of the work was inspired by the iconic artist H.R. Giger, who designed the alien costume for the movie franchise Aliens.

As with my Merino sculptures, through hours of trial and error, I developed my own technique for constructing the wool form, which I would describe as 'pressure stitching without using thread.'

Eidos

Central element of Eidos

Small Moldavite

The central liquid-like element is specifically green, which speaks to my previous explorations into Nature’s duality and mutability. Green symbolizes fertility and abundance, but with a slight change of tone, it can quickly become associated with something poisonous and unstable. Interestingly, green can also be found in a space rock known as Moldavite.

Moldavite was formed by a meteorite impacting Southern Germany 15 million years ago. It's known as a type of Tektite and is green due to aluminum and iron oxide impurities. It's incredible to think that the immense heat from the meteor impact with Earth created what I would classify as a form of extraterrestrial glass!

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