Peter Randall Page Part 2

In this interview, stone sculptor Peter Randall Page discusses his experience as a Winston Churchill Fellow and his study of marble carving techniques in Italy. He explains the traditional English masonry tradition of working from two dimensions to three dimensions using templates. He also shares his own method of scaling up sculptures using calipers and similar triangles. He mentions that this technique was once a trade secret in Italy, but he eventually learned it and used it in his own work. He also discusses other techniques used in stone carving, such as using a glass tank filled with opaque water to reveal cross sections of the sculpture. Overall, he emphasizes the importance of using common sense and intuition in the carving process. Hello, and welcome back to the Stonecarving Lettering Takeaway. I'm Nina Bilby. And I'm Charlotte Howard. And welcome to the second part of the Peter Randall Page interview. If you haven't listened to the first part, I strongly recommend you do that because the whole interview is an extraordinary account of one of our most famous stone sculptors. So with no more ado, welcome to the second part. I hope you enjoy it. I think Charlotte wanted to ask you about something that you both have in common. I think you're both a Winston Churchill Fellows. Oh, Churchill Fellows. I'll give it its full title as when we did it, and I love using the full title. The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Travelling Fellowship. That's what it was when I did it. Yeah, no, that's what it was. And I got that immediately after working at Wells Cathedral. I applied for it, and I applied in a slightly sort of, well, I applied for it as a way of being able to get to Italy and study marble carving, was what I'd learnt at Wells. And then subsequently, I'd worked with a Mason, with a traditional sort of English stonemason on Portland, a wonderful man called Skylark Durston, who was a kind of a 70-year-old retired Mason, who was also a poet and a violinist and a wonderful man. And he taught me an awful lot about conceiving, because it's all to do with conceiving one form inside another. And of course, the English masonry tradition is all to do with working from two dimensions to three dimensions by the application of templates. So you've got, you know, your block, and then you put a template on one side, you carve through like a prism, then you do it on the other side, carve through like a prism, which was really fascinating. And all these things really help you to understand how to conceptualise one form inside another. But then I'm on this Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Travelling Fellowship. And it was partly, I was looking at conservation things, which I wrote up as a kind of academic study, which I was, to be honest, I was much less interested in, because I was never really interested in being a conservator. I was, you know, I wanted to be a sculptor. But the other part was working near Carrara in Pietra Santa, and actually learning the techniques that they use, which are utterly different from the northern European masonry traditions, which was, again, absolutely fascinating. And at that time, you know, they use, I'm sure you know, they use triangulation really to be able to identify, you know, three known points in space, and you can identify any fourth point. The same, exactly the same technology that's used in navigation with the stars. And it's been around for a very, very long time, and probably grew out of probably the navigation techniques, maybe fed into the carving techniques. But when I was there in 1980, well, actually, it goes back a little bit before that. When I first left art college, I worked with the sculptor Barry Flanagan for a while. And he'd been to Italy, and he'd been to the carving workshops in Pietra Santa, and he'd seen them scaling up using, you know, using calipers. And it was kind of quite straightforward to see what they were doing. But anyway, when he got back to England, he was so fascinated by it, and he wanted to know how they do it. And at that time, it was a sort of trade secret. I mean, once you've got your three points in relation to your maquette, and you've got your three points, or at least three points, in relation to where you want the object to fall within the block of stone, then you're off. And you can just go from point A to the point you want to find. You use similar triangles, so there's no actual maths involved. You just use similar triangles. Open up your calipers to the small measurement. Extend it to the larger measurement. Scribe it on the stone. You do the same from the other two reference points, fixed reference points. And of course, to begin with, those arcs are a long way away from each other, because there's a great lump of stone in the middle. And then you chip away at that stone and do it again. And then you chip away and do it again. And gradually, the three arcs get closer and closer and closer together. And just before they meet, you kind of mark that with a spot. And then you go off and find another point. The tricky thing, of course, is to establish those initial reference points around the maquette and around the way you want the form to fit within the stone. So Barry Flanagan sort of commissioned me to find out what they were up to. But as I say, they kept it as that first bit. They didn't teach people that. And so I went to the British Library and looked up as much as I could about these things. And there are lots and lots about pointing machines and using calipers, but very little about how to establish how to. You've got to have some starting point, some reference point, in order to establish those three, at least three sort of master points, if you like. So I came up with an idea which is pretty crude, but it did work, making a space frame around the maquette and a space frame exactly the same proportions around the stone in such a way that you knew the form was going to fall within the stone. And then having like a T-square on the top, which you could move along, and a pin and a pointer going in. So you set it to a certain calibration there, set it to a certain calibration there. Then you'd sort of chip away or drill even, drill a hole. And then you'd kind of join up the dots. Of course, that's all very well unless you've got a very roundy kind of form, because then when you get to the edges, you're working from a straight plane and towards a curved surface. So you've got a very inaccurate, you know, it's not going at right angles. So then I made one which is more like a space frame barrel. So it was like a circular thing. So you were always, your pointer was always going towards the centre of the stone, which worked much better, but again, hugely clumsy compared to what I was watching them doing in Italy. So I went to Italy and worked there on this scholarship thing. Again, they didn't teach me how to do that initial setting up, although they were very generous in many other ways about teaching you things. But it was like a trade secret. Wow, I'm sort of really surprised. Yeah, no, it was, you know, they didn't, they weren't at all happy about teaching people that. So I then came back and I worked with my assistant David Brampton, who I've worked with for years. And it took us quite a long time, but we did actually work out how to do it. And I'm not sure it's the most elegant way, but it all relies on, you know, working from a flat plane and then working up from there and finding points from that. So we then started using that method on my own work. And it's such a beautiful, elegant method. I mean, it's by far the best way of scaling things up compared to the other one. But do you work with them, do you have three separate calipers that you set to the three? So you choose a finite, you choose your first point and then you decide on the other two. And then you have three separate calipers, or do you use the same? I mean, you'd need a few calipers unless you want to keep on, you know, setting them up over time. But once you're going with it, it's great. I mean, you can, you've got to use your common sense as well. Because of course, there's also a point where those three points will meet the other side. Yeah, they go through to the next layer. And also, if you can see if it looks wrong, you know, you've got to keep your wits about you, because you can't just work slavishly to the thing. You've got to use your common sense as well, because you can make tiny little mistakes and then you end up digging a bloody great hole in the stone where you don't need, where you don't want it. But in the end, we got really good at it and used it a lot for a lot of the Kilkenny limestone, big Kilkenny limestone carvings I did in the sort of 80s and 90s. And it's a really wonderful, wonderful, wonderful way of working. It's so funny, isn't it? I didn't realise, a friend of mine pointed out on the back of some of the Greek marble statues, sorry, Roman marble statues that I've seen, points where they had done exactly that, but they hadn't worked the points off on the back because you'd never see it. It was sort of put in a place where you wouldn't need to. And then moving forward, seeing the Rodin copies, you know, Rodin studio copies, and just seeing that technology move forward. And then now, of course, we've got 3D scanning, which is basically doing the same thing, isn't it? It's doing the same thing. Triangulation all over. Exactly. But I mean, if you look at something like Michelangelo's Unfinished Slaves, I mean, you would never do a carving like that. I mean, who would ever do a carving like that? I mean, even Michelangelo, you don't just start in one corner or one side, just work your way, unpeel it like an onion. You know, anybody who wasn't using a method like that, you'd gradually work down to the form and gradually get there and then put in the refinements and so on. So, you know, they were all doing it. I mean, mind you, there are all sorts of other interesting techniques that have been used over the years. For example, having a glass tank, which is the exact proportions of the block of stone, putting your maquette inside the tank and filling it with opaque water, water with dye in it, and you have a little tap on the bottom. And then you just let the water level come down. And it's just an aid to seeing a particular cross section at any particular point. So in that way, you can also sort of work your way down in a counterintuitive sort of way, you know, reveal the thing in sort of a contour of lines almost. And there are many ways that people have used as an aid to your brain, actually, because obviously, it's only a way of kind of imagining what's inside the block and how you're going to achieve that. I think for me, 3D printing in plaster has that effect. If you have a maquette printed or a slightly scaled up version of your maquette in plaster, it has the plaster application like an ordnance survey map, isn't it? Exactly. You've got those contours. It's a really, really useful thing. Yeah, no, definitely. So your designs, we touched on the design for your larger pieces. There's two questions I'm interested in. One is, which comes first, the boulder or the design? You're obviously continually drawing and playing on paper and maquette making. But then you have to go out and you find these found objects. First of all, where do you go to find, you know, a five-ton boulder? And second of all, how do you adapt your randomness, if you like, the random variations that you've been working on and knit the two together? How does that work? Yeah, yeah. Well, obviously, I mean, you know, the first thing, why do I choose random things to start with? For the very reason you just said, really, is that, you know, over the years, I've become less interested in making very similitude of things that already exist and rather trying to work in the way that nature works, which is having a random element and a self-imposed set of rules or patterns or geometry, which I apply to it. So that's why. That's the why. I get the boulders from, you can't just go and, you know, I live on Dartmoor, but you can't just go and start knitting boulders out of the landscape. I think you could. If anybody could, Peter, it would be you. But I don't think we could. No, it's where they've been displaced by some sort of human activity. I mean, in Finland, for example, they quarry glacial moraine for gravel and sand. And every now and again, they come across these glacial erratic boulders, and they put them to one side. And then when they finish, they either bury them or they sort of re-landscape or they all sometimes they sell them to a landscape architect for doing something outside some sort of out-of-town showroom or something. So there are various things. Here on Dartmoor, I mean, for many, many years, they were clearing fields of boulders. So they'd be pushing them off the edge. And occasionally you've got massive piles of them. And occasionally it's not taking a natural thing from its natural position. You're kind of just taking one from somewhere it's already been displaced to. So that's how I get the boulders. The other bit of the question, the starting point, I don't make preliminary drawings for those works. I draw directly onto the stone itself. So there's a response. You're responding to what you're feeling and seeing. It's a response to the given shape of the thing in the context of the kind of set of rules that I've decided to apply to it. In this sense, another big influence on me was Darcy Thompson. I don't know if you've ever read On Growth and Form. But I think he was, in his own way, as significant as Darwin was because he revealed something which is now so blindingly obvious that we can hardly believe that we didn't know it properly before. And that is that organic form isn't exempt from the laws of physics, really, and that things morph from one thing to another. So a lot of his things were about applying grids to things and then fish, for example, and then showing how a certain fish would develop into a flat fish or a round fish or whatever. So, yes, I mean, there's a piece I did in – there's various ways of doing that. I mean, I'm generally trying to – these days, I'm trying to respond in quite an improvisatory way to the shape of the stone within the rules I've set myself. So, for example, the continuous line that goes all the way around and meets up with itself. So, in a way, it's like infinite – it's like a sort of – it's like a microcosm of infinity, if you know what I mean. Because it's a sort of infinite line on a boundless form. And I rather love that idea. So a lot of the time, I'm working on those sorts of things these days. But I've also – and then I'm trying to respond to the shape of the stone. So, you know, a lot of drawing, first of all, with charcoal and chalk and rubbing out and changing it. It's like a puzzle. They are quite a puzzle because it's very easy to end up with several discrete things which join up to one another, to itself. And actually, unless you really do follow it around with your finger, then you wouldn't really know. And if they're a great big stone, then of course, you can't, unless you roll it over, you can't – you just have to take my word for it. But it's a self-imposed discipline, which I just find helpful. Because while one bit of one's brain is concerned with sticking to the rules, solving the puzzle within the context of an aesthetically satisfying response to the shape of the stone, and weirdly, because your brain is busy doing that, somehow, one's kind of aesthetic sort of judgment, or aesthetic judgment may be wrong, but your feeling about how the line and the things you're doing to it make it feel on a kind of emotional and sort of a meaningful level. And it makes that a lot easier. So I start off drawing with something that's easy to rub out, like chalk and charcoal, so I can just blow it off and change it. And then quite often using lots of different coloured chalk so that I don't get in a muddle with having more than one discrete system. And I might start off with drawing on it so I like the feel of it. And then I'll have to go onto that with a piece of red chalk. And then I might have a piece of yellow chalk. And then in the end, and several other colours. And I've got to, in the end, make them all join up so they're all one continuous line. And that's the only way of doing it. And I kind of love that process. It's very, very meditative. And I want my work to be meditative. And it is meditative in the making. You know, I get completely, literally lost in this kind of self-creating mazes. Other times, less so now, but for quite a long time, I was interested in imposing geometric patterns onto these random shapes. And, you know, wonderful things start to happen. I mean, it's like if you lay out spheres on a flat surface, they all become, each one is surrounded by six of the hexagonal patterns goes on forever. As soon as you introduce a kind of topography or an undulation, all kinds of other things happen and you're in a completely other world. And one of the, well, one of the biggest pieces I did like that was one that's in Newcastle called Give and Take. And it's a great big 45-ton sort of glacial boulder from Scotland. And what I did is I made a kind of elastic net, which comprised 20 equilateral triangles. So when the elastic wasn't stretched, all the pieces of elastic were the same length. Tied them onto key rings at the intersections and then manipulated that around on the boulder. So I liked how it fitted on the boulder. Then I dissected all those big triangles into four. So, you know, you get cutting off the corners, as it were, and having one in the middle and then dissect them again. And you end up with a kind of a three-dimensional, well, you end up with a kind of wonky sort of version, in that case, of alternating kind of dodecahedron, icosahedron. So I ended up with one which had sort of 20 original, I think, no, you end up with 12 original sort of five-sided shapes where the key rings were. And then all the rest fills in with six-sided shapes. And what I was interested there was, you know, when the stone is bulgy, where it's convex, the forms quite naturally, because of the elastic, sort of swell out. And where it's relatively flat, it's even. And where it's concave, they all scrunch up together. And I was really interested in the way, well, it's actually, in a sense, without being politically incorrect, it's the kind of fishnet tights theory of sculpture. Once you divide a form up into increments, you're much more aware of the form. I mean, if it's just an undifferentiated blob, then you don't. My mind's doing that guy with the string vest, what was he called? Raffi Nesbitt. Yeah, maybe the string vest theory of sculpture. But, you know, it does enable you to, you know, to actually appreciate and be aware of the form, which is why I think, you know, fishnet tights are thought to be sexy, because you see the form better. It sort of makes you think about what's inside the surface as well, doesn't it? It allows you past the surface. Absolutely. And it slows your eye down because you're seeing these increments, you know. So that's, you know, that's obviously why it's called give and take, that particular piece. Amazing. So ingenious. The way you manipulate materials through sort of playful, you're inventing ways to solve problems or to impose. You want these lines to work, so you're playing, you know, the whole idea of an elastic net, to me, is absolutely brilliant. No, it's a brilliant way to work, actually. I mean, people said to me at the time, you know, what you ought to do is get this thing scanned by a computer and then, you know, you see laser levels and things. They are, you know, computer scans, they basically do the same thing. I mean, actually, Darcy Thompson did wonderful drawings of the same sort of thing where, you know, geometry was tied to something where it was distorted. And it really is very fundamental about, you know, because you can, it really elucidates how you can rationalize organic form or natural random form into a geometric structure. And I think there's some great sort of satisfaction about that. I think we recognize that as human beings, as an instinctive level, because this is what surrounds us in the world. And we may not think about it in that way. But I mean, in a sense, you know, geometry only exists in our imagination because it's kind of predicated on the idea of an infinitely thin line and infinitely small dots, which obviously don't exist. And again, going back to the idea of theme and variation, it's very easy to see why how you need a theme to have variations. But actually, conversely, you could see it the other way around and see it as just that we understand and comprehend as human beings, the theme by extrapolating from looking at lots and lots of variations. And I think we just do that without thinking about it, you know. And that's why we recognize families of objects and what a plants person would call the habit of a plant. You know, we don't we do it without even knowing it. If you recognize the form of a tree in, you know, in winter when it hasn't got any leaves on or in summer, when it has, you know, you're recognizing it as an oak tree or an ash tree on a really sort of fundamental level about pattern and about very complex, but we're recognizing the common aspect elements. And, you know, in the same way with anything, I mean, you never get a perfectly spherical pebble or perfectly spherical potato, but they're both trying to aspire to a minimum surface area to volume ratio and for very different reasons in completely geometric the opposite ways. But we do extrapolate from that to the idea of a sphere which doesn't exist in nature. I mean, not even planets are spherical, you know, you know, nothing spherical, but we, we hold the idea in our minds and our imaginations of a sphere. Actually, it only exists in our heads, you know, but it but it is the theme and that theme exists in our heads. And then the same way in music, I mean, I love Baroque music, I love Bach, and I love jazz, and I love bebop and Charlie Parker. And they're doing the same thing, you know, they're actually playing with this very human, simple, satisfying feeling of, you know, you know, the themes there, and then the music goes way away from it, and become incredibly complex with inversions and, you know, and all kinds of playful things and double time and triple time. I mean, you know, Bach does it to extraordinary extent as does Charlie Parker and Charles Mingus and people like that. But we still we still hold within our, in our understanding, in our understanding of abstraction and a variation, we know we can still just about feel that and then it comes back to the thing. And that's just a beautiful, simple, human pleasure, which is, you know, just because it's simple, it doesn't mean it can't be transcendental. In our DNA, in our evolution, going back to... We're made of the same stuff, aren't we? We're made of the same stuff. And we've evolved in this universe like everything else. So it would be pretty weird if we didn't have that instinctive understanding of things like that. Well, I think what's lovely about looking at your work is that you draw back focus to that, because I think we can quite easily lose sight of the things that we know. So it's very important to put those things in front of you again to reacquaint you, like pulling it back into focus. Sometimes it can be so just, you know, dissolved into other things that we're looking at. So... Yeah, I mean, I think to me, you know, I hope that, you know, I hope the things I make can... I don't think people have to kind of be that interested in all the stuff I've just been talking about. But what I would like to think is that they can have a straightforward appreciation. It just makes them maybe, you know, see the world in a slightly fresh way and awaken something which is latent in all of us, which is easy to lose sight of in a world where things have so much to do with breaking things down into parts and understanding things in a kind of, I suppose it's what the Greeks would have called sort of Apollonian approach rather than Dionysian approach, you know, and breaking it down into its bits, rather than actually feeling the whole thing, you know, the whole of nature kind of buzzing away, and the whole of human creativity buzzing along with it as well. I remember going to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and seeing your kind of retrospective there. And it was, you know, people were going there on a Sunday, and they were going for a walk, and they were taking the dog for a walk, you know, that people who live locally, probably, or Leeds area. And it's people's emotional responses to objects that had also been brought indoors. There was work that, you know, monumental works that were inside. And I think that was also fantastic, the separation of seeing these monolithic, we're very used to seeing this country monoliths in the outside environment. But when you start bringing scale into focus, like on mass models, and the maquettes, and the smaller works, indoors, people were having a very emotional response, myself included. It felt very reverent, actually, like you were experiencing something other than sculpture, which I think is really fascinating the way that, you know, these objects could be seen in scale, you know, you could put the small ones in the environment, or indoors, and they affect you differently. And I think that that was really fascinating for me, watching people look at the work in those external and internal spaces, which spoke to people not necessarily there to look at sculpture, you know, they were fascinated by it. Yeah, well, that's a really lovely thing to say. And that, you know, that's sort of what I hope, you know, and you can only hope, because it's an act of faith that what you feel about things when you're making them, you know, it's an act of faith that other people are not that different from oneself. Otherwise, you couldn't really do any of these things. But thank you for that. I really appreciate that. It was a wonderful opportunity. Oh, my God, and the setting, obviously, is second to none in this country, I think. And we wanted to brief, I know we've been taking a lot of your time up. So there was just a couple of other questions. One was kind of joined up ones, really. You have assistants that help you do the larger works, I assume for specific projects. And I know you've done some teaching as well. So I wonder how having an assistant and having to discuss what you're looking for, and do you train them yourself? Or do you get established workers? Or how does that work? Well, I haven't, I've really reduced my team right down now, because I'm, you know, I can't do the carving in the way that I used to. I mean, I'm 70 next year, and I've got a bad back and all that kind of thing. So I've got a much reduced team. But I never had a very big team, I had a team of two or three people who worked with me for many, many, many, many years. And we established together ways of working where I wasn't asking them to make aesthetic decisions on my behalf. We've talked about triangulation. And with that method, I would get them to go where those arcs that we talked about don't quite meet. So we're talking about, you know, finishing about half an inch off the surface, and then I finish them myself. The ways of working, which I'm still doing now, actually, with my one assistant, where I draw a line on the stone, and then do a little bit to show the sort of style or the manner or the habit of the line I want to achieve. Yeah, and then, but it's all been to do with working with people for a very long time. And they're all people who've just turned up pretty randomly, a lot of people have been through the studio. Over the years, a lot of them have gone on to make their own careers and become, you know, become the competition, I think, but which is, which is okay. And I've really delighted when they, you know, when they make a go of it, and a lot of them have, it's, but I haven't ever sort of formally kind of advertised for anybody or anything like that. It's just sort of happened in a very happy and lucky kind of way that people have, have just, just met people, and they've been interested, and they've got involved, and mostly stayed for a few years. But, you know, two people in particular, worked with me for 35, you know, 35, 40 years. And, and over that period, you build up a really, you know, you really understand. And it's, you know, they don't, those particular people don't, didn't want to be sculptors, you know, and so it wasn't sort of like, well, I'm just sort of doing this because I can't do my own work. But there were a lot of challenges along the way. And the two people really, David Brampton, and PJ Dove, and David was the carver, who worked with me on the carvings, and we'd get other people in when we needed them. PJ was the sort of, was the studio manager, sort of cleverest person I've ever met, who could invent machines and work out ways of doing things. I mean, he invented a massive stone lathe for making the piece for the Eden project, which, you know, which we made out, you know, he designed that and built it, and you can put 100 tonnes of stone on it. Wow, I hadn't understood that that had been turned. Yes, it was turned, the basic shape was turned and we made a lathe. That blows my mind. Yes, a vertical lathe. So, we used the slew ring from an old quarry swing shovel, you can put over 100 tonnes on it and turn it in a highly controlled way, incrementally, degree by degree, with a platform next to it, where you could attach, horizontally attach circular saw blades, and then you'd make a cutting schedule. So, to begin with, you'd be cutting out, you know, cutting cuts about six inches apart and banging off great bits of stone, and ending up virtually milling it, you know, with eight mil gaps between the saw cuts. And then applying the, applying the pattern, the Fibonacci, the spiral for the taxis pattern, which again, I thought could be done possibly with computer technology. So, we, I got to work with a computer technician who, together we put the whole thing into virtual space. And the theory was that you could turn the model in virtual, the virtual model in virtual space. And you could also turn in the same way you could turn, you know, this huge stone in the same way. And you could do it in increments of degrees as you wanted. And originally, I thought, well, we can do that, we can do it at night, project the thing onto the pattern, onto the stone. But it didn't, it didn't work, because I think the focal length of the camera in the computer was wrong. So, I ended up sort of actually drawing this very complex pattern on, not by eye, but working out the geometry of it. And again, that, you know, learned an awful lot doing that. I saw that for the first time earlier this year, I was down in the Eden Centre. Oh, yeah. And absolutely beautiful. I loved it. Thank you so much. Yeah, I've just cleaned up the chamber a bit, which is nice. It was all getting a bit grubby. I'm really conscious that we've kept you for a really long time. Yeah. I had one last question about the Cathedral Fabric Commission of England, the CFCF, Cathedral Fabric Commissioning of England, which is the organisation that sees every proposed new work to go on a cathedral in the country, isn't it, I think? Yeah. And you're part of that commission, aren't you? I am. I was really pleased to hear that, because both Charlotte and I present to commissioning committees and fabric committees quite regularly, and to have the maker of your experience is extraordinary. Did you approach them, or did they approach you? No, no. What it is, is traditionally, well, not traditionally, I think ever since it's been going, they've always had a Royal Academician on their committee. So before me was a sculptor called Alison Wilding, who I know quite well. But you can imagine there aren't that many Royal Academicians who have much experience of cathedrals, both doing work on the fabric of buildings, and also, like at Southwark Cathedral, I've got a sculpture outside there. And so, you know, I'm working on Wales Cathedral and also other churches in the early days. So, you know, it's very nice that they put me forward for it. And I'm really honoured to be part of it. Sadly, I haven't been as involved as I'd like to have been for health reasons. I mean, I was involved at the beginning, we did a, you know, I did some stuff to do with St Paul's and and then to do with Exodus Cathedral, my local cathedral. And it's a huge honour, and I'd like to be much more involved. But I just haven't been, I'm just a bit slowed down by illness. So I can't, you know, I haven't, I've had to duck out of a lot of stuff that involved a lot of travelling and things. So, so I would like, I hope to be doing a lot more of that, because it's a great honour. And, you know, it's a really fantastic thing to be asked to do. But yes, I mean, I think, I hope I can bring something to it. I think, you know, where things have to be changed for practical reasons. I mean, the extraordinary one, really, rather ghastly at St Paul's is that they, you know, they'd have people, a lot of people committing suicide from the Whispering Gallery. So it was a matter of having to come up with a way of stopping people throwing themselves off, which is obviously a kind of aesthetic decision. It's not a decision, which is, has an awful lot to do with, with ecclesiastical architecture, because there's not something that exists in ecclesiastical architecture. But, you know, I was really pleased to be able to, you know, put my two pennies worth in about how I thought aesthetically that might work to sort of cage it in without it being too obtrusive. And then at Exeter Cathedral, you know, I'm probably a bit more involved, because it's just down the road, and I can go there much more easily. And there are some things that are moving and some things they're proposing to put in and some changes. And, I mean, I think everybody, you know, there are lots of very, very eminent people, far more eminent than me about cathedrals and ecclesiastical architects and so on. But I think, you know, maybe having somebody who's a hands on maker and got some experience and also a great love of medieval architecture and cathedrals, it just adds something else into the mix, really. And I feel sad I haven't been able to do more, but I feel very flattered to have been asked. I'm still on there. I'm just hoping to get back to better health so I can go zooming around the country again. I'm looking forward to seeing you at one of these meetings. I think we've naturally come to the end. Charlotte, have you got anything else? No, I think we've really covered a lot of ground and probably taken more time than we thought. So I sort of feel we should probably just say a huge thank you, unless there's something you'd like to add. No, I'd just like to thank you for asking me, because it's a real pleasure to be asked. And I enjoyed doing the thing with Roger and what an extraordinary man he is. And I also, when I came into the office this morning, and I saw your questions, I thought, wow, these are really good questions. It must be a bit cheeky sending the questions in advance. You've had students and things saying, you know, why do you make sculpture? And you think, oh, how many have you got? This felt really, you know, really, really good questions. And, you know, that made me feel very wholehearted about trying to answer them as quickly as I could. Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It's such a pleasure and an honour to speak to you. Bye bye. Bye bye. OK, so what do you think, Charlotte? I mean, he's an amazingly generous man, isn't he, with his information and his thought processes, and gave me a huge amount to ponder, actually. Yeah, it made me come away and think a lot about, you know, the work that I do, how I think about my work. It's really made me sort of think a lot about some of the repetitive processes that I have done, and maybe not thought about in quite the same way that I do now, after listening to what he says. Well, I actually, I really loved his kind of comparison to the draped figures on Wells Cathedral when he was doing some conservation there. I was amazed that they gave, and it's, you know, I think everybody should do this, they gave everybody Friday to go and draw, and they didn't check up on them to make sure that they were drawing in a sketchbook. And I mean, what an extraordinary gift to give a young person when they're entering the industry, really. And it's obviously touched him and influenced him in his later works. And I love seeing the connections between the study of older historical works to modern day practice and that kind of journey through the looking and the understanding. I love the fact that he said, you know, the abstracted draped forms. I just absolutely love it because drapery is abstraction in such a beautiful way, if you look at it in its purest form. I thought when he said that, it was like a light bulb moment going off in my head, and I could suddenly see a deeper understanding of his work. So I've been looking at his work for many years. I've got a number of books of his work, I've seen his sculptures. But to hear him say that, it was like a light bulb moment that gave me a deeper understanding of what he had been making as well. I think for me, I always thought of him as an abstract sculptor. It's obvious it's not. It's completely based in the real. It's just his focus and his kind of micro focus on the surface and patterns and, you know, nature. Absolutely loved it. And I really resonate with what he said about jazz and music and the playing of musical instruments. And I loved his anecdote that, you know, life without rules isn't as much fun. I quite like the football anecdote, you know, football without rules is just somebody kicking a ball about. Or, you know, music without written, you know, jazz without rules or limits. Limits make you more creative and more interesting than having no limits. And what a brilliant thing to say out loud, because I think you and I both agree with that. But sometimes it needs somebody of his reputation and at the point of the career that he is at to say that out loud to actually resonate with other people. And I equally would agree with you. I think the wonderful thing about lettering is it's all about rules, to begin with. So you understand about the nature of freedom and creativity within a set boundary and where you can then start to break the rules. I've always understood that. But I agree with you to hear somebody saying it with such a creative view about it. I thought that's great as well. The fact that we make things out of objects that have a finite edge, that we work from the outside edge into the middle of the object, rather than the middle of the object with no limits of how you go out. So, you know, if you're working in clay or plaster, you can go forever. You can add and add and add. But we naturally work within the limits of the lump of stone that we choose. So sometimes it's, you know, it's good to remind yourself of that. Anyway, if you've enjoyed it, hit follow or subscribe for more. Yes, hopefully there'll be many, many more. Well, there are many, many more because we've got some exciting guests in the new year, haven't we? We have. And we're very excited about 2024. We've got some great things coming in 2024. We've got a good list of guests beginning to line up. Some guests and courses, some exciting stuff going on that we'll share with you in the new year. So here's to a full creative year ahead of everybody. Oh, hang on. Hang on. Can I have a top tip? Oh, yeah. Top tip. We love a top tip. We're going in the fitting room. Let's hang on. Let's pull back the curtain on the fitting room. Let's just knock on the door, make sure no one's in there. Go in the fitting room. I've been listening because the work I've been doing at the moment is quite small, so I've been able to listen to quite a lot of other podcasts. Not as good as ours, of course. But I've been listening to the Great Women Artists podcast. It's been going since pre-COVID, I think, 2012, actually. It's hosted by a woman called Katie Hessel. And it started off as an Instagram page where she posted about a woman artist every single day, and it kind of snowballed. There's a book that you might be familiar with, Great Artists Without Men, which is a women's art history, which is great if you're looking for something to buy yourself in the new year in sales and stuff. But she does a month, I think it's weekly, actually, podcast. And the most recent one is an interview with Kirsten Buick, who is a historian, and she looks at the life and the work of Edmonia Lewis. Now, Edmonia Lewis is a really interesting American stone carver. So I would highly recommend that. Edmonia Lewis lived between 1844 and 1907, and marble busts and figurative sculptures, sculptures, sorry, that were very, or are incredibly important in cultural reference in the States. So I'm going to say no more about that. Have a look, listen, and tell us what you think about it. I think it's a really good podcast. And hopefully you'll enjoy the back catalogue as well as I have. We all love a back catalogue. I love a back catalogue. We've got one of those if any of you get bored this week. Anyway, so Happy New Year to all. Yeah, and happy chipping for 2024. Yeah, happy chipping. And we'll see you soon.