MARC'S STORY
An appreciation of only living once & needing to achieve what drives you.
I’ve always liked making things. As a child growing up in London, I was the one forever taking things apart, not to break them, but to understand them. Donald, our local handyman, built me a folding carpenter’s bench with a vice, I must have been 9 or 10. It was the best gift I have ever received.
We lived on a hill, so we built go-karts. My hard drinking next-door neighbor was always restoring something a MK II Jag, a VW camper, an MGB, scotch in hand, something on the radio. I was mesmerized, his eager helper. First bikes, then engines, then metal , I wanted to know how everything worked. And once you understand that, you realise: if you can see the objective clearly enough, you can make anything. Including food, particuarly food, especially food.
Making is making.
But it was always about beauty too. That old rusting Jag, gunmetal grey, cracked red leather, a peeling wooden dashboard was still one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. I never understood how ugliness made it into cars or buildings. And then, ironically, I became a building surveyor, drawing up plans and project managing exactly the constructions I didn’t believe in.
How did Gaudí get away with it? Not in London. Not then.
So I left.
I turned to drawing. painting and cooking. But mostly, I turned to sculpture.
Sculpture is it for me. I want to hold it, walk around it, set light to it, freeze it, burn it. It’s three-dimensional. It’s physical, tactile and very real.
Metal is my language. I adore it, every kind, every form. Casting molten bronze is visceral, primeval and dangerous. Working with sheet metal, not in factories but with hammers, is a dying art. Most modern alloys hate being shaped this way, they tear and crack and fight you. But that’s part of it. If the hammer isn’t heavy enough, make a bigger one. Build a better anvil. Invent tools. Invent a language.
Begrunzle. Bejesus. Begorence. You don’t just make metal forms, you make stories, sounds, and scars. The machines and equipment are modern and old, new ultra hightech welding masks and heavy leather gloves, plasma cutters and hammers.
Forging is never a solo effort. It’s violent. It causes injury, bruises, cuts and burns. It demands rhythm and instinct and reflexes. What comes from it can be extraordinary.
My sculptures are often figurative but never literal. I’m interested in form, in the memory of muscle, the erosion of time, the tension between fragility and strength. I have installed torsos in many places, I like to see them tranform with weather and time. However nothing matches my great passion, the sea. The tide embraces them like ancient relics. They are bodies of metal, but they are also vessels of everything else I carry; love, risk, strength, permanence.
Furniture came next. Practical, useful yet also poetic. When my first child was born, I made the most delicate crib from metal. The cats claimed it before he arrived. The chairs have been swimming around in my mind since childhood: sketches, models, years of quiet obsession. A lifelong pursuit of the marriage between design, materials, art, and function.
Now, finally I also make this crazy furniture, each piece the product of years of imagination and contemplation. Sculptural, functional, and made with passion.
Marc