At fifteen years of age, a chance visit to the open air Battersea Park Sculpture Exhibition made an enormous impression on me. Having grown up in a rural community in the Chilterns, the physicality of farming, forestry and the local Blacksmith's workshop had already given me a love of objects and materials. 

My interest in literature, poetry and philosophy cut diagonally through the practical fields of metalwork, earth working with huge machines and harvesting but where the diagonals crossed, sculpture became the common focus which embraced these disparate but not necessarily separate influences. 

After seven years at three art schools under many fine teachers at Camberwell School of Art and City and Guilds sculpture school, my instincts compelled me to teach and remain in art colleges for the next thirty five years. I retired as the acting Head of the Sir John Cass Department of Fine Art in 1993. 

My own sculpture developed primarily from figurative sources and became quite large, the Black Queen, White Knight exhibited at the RA was twelve feet by ten feet in area and made from perspex, GRP resin and Portland stone. Twelve of my sculptures have been shown at the RA and two solo shows have moved my work towards a more abstract and conceptual bias, although the clay portrait from life is still one of the most engaging and challenging ways of making sculpture. 

I have been commissioned on numerous occasions to design and make coins and medals for the Royal Mint and my interest in art education has allowed me the opportunity to teach, assess and lecture on the history of sculpture. Art history is the tap root which extends from ancient times to the present day and offers us this remarkable energised evolution which makes all art, both ancient and modern, contemporary.