Made for the sculpture challenge on Handmade : Britain’s Best Woodworker, a reality
television competition screened on Channel 4 in 2021. The brief was to produce a one
metre tall sculpture of an animal in just two days, and this piece was awarded first
place by the judges, and contributed to my overall win in the competition.
Misti the artist comments; While I may have a good eye for a curve, and an understanding of proportion, accurate
representation of tricky things like hands and faces is really not my given talent, so I
needed to find a way of abstracting a recognisable subject matter while at the same
time leaving the viewer in no doubt as to what it was.
By their very nature Zebras offer a great opportunity for both graphic and sculptural
statements, so I settled on this magnificent animal as my subject matter, and presented
it in the manner of a portrait bust to lend it a quiet dignity. The choice to create the
head as a flat and fretted image means that it is only truly visible from face on, and this,
coupled with the careful manipulation of form and negative space reflects its ability to
camouflage itself.
However, sculpture isn’t just necessarily just about three dimensional representation
of subject matter, and often the most powerful pieces send a message, so just before I
started, I decided to add a tear of blood, carved in lime wood, for it to cry in despair at
man’s rape and destruction of nature. In the end, while the zebra part of this piece
worked beautifully, for me it became more a portrait of the tear than the animal,
resulting in a poignant work that invites the viewer to consider their impact on our
planet
Wood carving
Sculpture
