Camille Moreno in Conversation with Sculptor David Williams-Ellis
Renowned British artist David Williams-Ellis creates energetic, figurative sculptures that are enlivened with an uncanny sense of movement and breath. Sculpted from clay and cast in bronze, these sometimes colossal works start as small maquettes in his light-flooded Oxfordshire studio.
His sculptures belong to private collections worldwide and can also be found in public spaces, including his recently unveiled D-Day memorial at Gold Beach in Normandy, a collaboration with architect Liam O’Connor for which he was awarded the prestigious Henry Hering Art and Architecture Award.
Having recently revealed his latest project, The Ram, available in a limited quantity to private collectors, we sat down to discuss lockdown inspiration, muses, animals, and what it means to make good art.
David Williams-Ellis in his Oxfordshire studio. Photo by Alun Callender. Courtesy of the artist.
Camille Moreno: How has Oxfordshire changed since you first arrived?
David Williams-Ellis: I moved here before Soho Farmhouse was here. It's become very busy because of that. It was already a fashionable place, but Soho Farmhouse made it go mad. Property prices are the highest in the country now virtually. People want to be near it and around it, there are more barns being sold for more millions and millions of pounds than you could possibly imagine. Every pub in the area is now a gastropub of a very high standard; they turn into sort of mini-hotels.
CM: Has that been beneficial for you to connect with collectors?
DWE: It does make people want to come and see me and my studio. People are always interested, so yes, it probably brought people to come and see me in the studio, which of course in person is always the best way to be because it's physical, because sculpture is so three dimensional. It's better to see it in the flesh.
CM: Would you say you're happy about the change?
DWE: I have ambivalence. Part of it is that the roads are much busier–a lot busier. That's probably the one thing, really. You come to the countryside and you don't quite expect to be mowed down by one SUV after another on a little country lane.
David Williams-Ellis, Yves du Monceau. Bronze sculpture, life and a tenth. University Louvain, Belgium. Photo by Anthony Dehez. Courtesy of the artist.
CM: How did you spend lockdown and did it have an impact on your work?
DWE: The first lockdown was a very weird period because we didn't know what was going on. It was a great time to reflect. It made me reassess my work. The problem was getting models. Eventually, my model came and lived here because it was easier. We worked and made our own little Covid group and it was fine. It was great because of this distraction of life, which I'm sure we all find–you didn't have all the things like travelling and exhibitions or seeing people. You were just focused on your immediate environment, and in my case focused on my work which I love and I'm passionate about, so I was able to really concentrate on it. It was good for me.
M: Is it always important for you to have a relationship with the model?
DWE: You spend so much time with them. You get a subtle empathy–you get the subtlety of their characteristics which give sculptural painting life. Having been a portrait artist as well, it's very important to have that. I'm not doing a portrait of my model, but I'm looking for character. I'm looking for something that gives you that slightly more visceral feeling. It's that slight magic that you, as an artist, hope you can use to give to other people. It's what I feel I’m trying to capture.
CM: I would describe that as something that makes you question what you think you know and what you're looking at.
DWE: Exactly. That's the difference between a gimmick and what I think is “good art.” When you go see something that's really exciting, some great painting in the Metropolitan or the National Gallery or wherever it is, and you want to go back. It's not just that one-off. An awful lot of gimmicks are made today in the contemporary arts. Some of it is amazing, and some of it you just see it once and think, oh that's really exciting, but you don't actually want to come back to it. It doesn't leave you with that internal feeling of desire and wanting to feel more from it. If, as an artist, you can put that into something, I think it creates good art.
CM: Did living with your model enable you to have a more intimate relationship?
DWE: I think yes, but it's not necessary. I think that sometimes the pieces that haven't worked are maybe people that I haven't quite gelled with. I haven't caught that magic. So I think it can be, but I don't think it's necessary.
CM: Does the sculpture suffer if you don't catch that magic?
DWE: I think you know when something's good and it normally means that you've got the magic. You know it as an artist and as a viewer. I think that reflects the relationship when you have been working on it. To contradict that, I've worked with animals and that was something else. I put energy into that. I can't say I had a great relationship with my ram that lived in the field in front of the house.
CM: Was there just one ram, or several?
DWE: One and his friend. There was one who was emasculated and just there as a friend. I had one ram who was very proud of himself and very ram-like, but I can't say my relationship with him was close. That was during the lockdown as well–the second one. I worked with him while I did the maquettes and made the large sculpture. I used to go out and sit with him and draw him and study him.
David Williams-Ellis with The Ram and his dogs. Photo by Alun Callender. Courtesy of the artist.
CM: Would you like to work more with animals?
DWE: That's quite a challenge because the ram was a little bit out of my norm. With humans, I'm looking for emotion, and trying to put emotion into animals is interesting. I try to achieve it and with the ram's head, I think it has got a feeling. People say it draws you in, it has a resonance. I'd like to work on that again, but any new challenges are great.
CM: Do you have any animals? Cats or dogs?
DWE: Dogs. I have dogs. I love my animals. I've had farm animals over the years; all sorts of the inevitable: guinea pigs, budgerigars, and rabbits, and all the disasters that go with it. The dog ate the guinea pig. That was probably the worst one. The guinea pig escaped, unfortunately.
CM: Wow, what a story.
DWE: It's part of life.
CM: How did you arrive at the scale of the rams?
DWE: Scale is so important with outdoor monuments and sculptures. I came to that scale by being slightly site-specific. I got a big sheet of painted plyboard and we lifted it in the air. I had people standing around it and worked out that it needed to be that scale in order to be big enough to hold that site and be seen from the positions where it needed to be seen. The photograph you see is of the ram at about 3 metres by 2 metres, so it's big and it weighed about 2.5 tonnes in clay. The one it's going to be made into is going to be 4.5 metres high by 7.5 metres wide so it's going to be enormous.
CM: Regarding the editions–if they aren't site-specific do you feel you want to have any involvement in where they end up or are you okay to relinquish that control?
DWE: I think with the very big ones you're going to have input–people are going to want you to have input. But when you sell a sculpture, if you sell it to a gallery or something, it's out of your hands. Although they are site-specific, a good sculpture should work in any format, in any way. You should be able to look at it, turn it around–it shouldn't just work from one side. It should have strength and volume to give it the energy to work anywhere.
CM: How do you think about sculptural elements in relation to colour and patina? Is the patina more of a post-sculptural process?
DWE: It's a bit of both. Patina is a chemical reaction and it's never accurate, so you can't just paint. In medieval times, sculptures were all painted, but the way one works with bronze is through a chemical reaction with the surface that changes and evolves over time, so you'll have something outside that evolves. I find that the patina is important to the sculpture. If you get the wrong patina it can change the sculpture and not give you that magic, not give you that feeling. You need to have the correct colour on it. I tend to look internally at my sculpture first, at the form. The patina is not incidental, but it's not on day one when I think about it.
David Williams-Ellis, Reflections IV, 2019. Bronze sculpture (antique patina), 55 x 29 x 15 cm. Edition of 9 (2 of 9). Signed and Numbered. Courtesy of Floren Art Gallery.
CM: You studied in Italy. What role did Italy play in your practice?
DWE: You've got to think of my age. In the 1970s and 1980s, art schools were very progressive in the UK and I wasn't interested in that conceptual route. I very much wanted to learn drawing and modelling techniques that I couldn't find here. The Renaissance, for me, is magic. In Florence as a young impressionable student, I was absorbing it the whole time. I think the reason I didn't stay there is because, for me, life is too easy in Italy. The food's too good, the life's too comfortable, the weather's too good. I felt that I needed to get back to a little bit of grit. There were a lot of people who worked in Italy from all around the world–artists–who really were doing nothing. Although they studied there and learned a lot, they were there for the good life in the end, or the good life had taken over. I just knew that after two or three years of being there that I had to get back. When I got back, London was beginning to have an exciting Renaissance. Not necessarily of sculpture and painting–but it was all the craft and decorating, glass, and leatherwork being explored and developed in the 1980s, so there was quite a flowering going on of traditional skills.
CM: Would you have studied in the UK if the environment had been more like it is now?
DWE: Maybe, but I think everyone needs to get away from their own environment to observe things and get a fresher mind. When I got back to London in my 20s, I found there were a lot of empty properties. The development in London wasn't as important as it is now, or valuable. I was there for about seven years and had virtually free studios. Being a sculptor, you need your kit, you need all those tools. Moving around is also harder today than it was. The digital world has made it much more difficult for us to have freedom of movement and travel.
CM: I like this advice–to put yourself outside of your environment. What other advice would you give to aspiring students and sculptors?
DWE: As ever in life, take risks. If you don't take chances in life you're not going to achieve. I've known friends and other people who have been quite talented as artists, but they've never really taken the challenges, and their work has become rather staid and repetitive. I also think that you need that skill set in order that you're free. A classical musician or dancer who trains and trains and trains can do anything. I think it's so important to have that discipline, to get those skills so that you're free to do what you want. I still have the odd regret that I didn't push a certain part of my skill set, but sometimes these things take longer; sometimes I've had to learn something in my 30s, 40s, 50s. Also just be prepared that it's going to be quite tough. However well resourced you are, it's a lonely profession because there's no one who really judges except for you at the end of the day. There are not many working environments where it's entirely up to you. You are your judge–and it's not the financial rewards that actually create a successful artist.
CM: Have you had to be self-critical to get better?
DWE: Self-criticism, yes, I think you've got to take those challenges. Again, travelling is really good for that because it takes you away from your work and makes you look at it in a different light because you've looked at other things. In your day to day life, it's very good to go away and do something completely different, when you're writing an essay or writing a book or whatever it is, come back and look at it and see that in a different light. I've woken up. I think that on a bigger scale, is important. Self-criticism is really important.
David Williams-Ellis, D-Day sculpture in Ver-Sur-Mer, France. Photograph courtesy of the artist and the Normandy Memorial Trust.
CM: How can you balance it with patting yourself on the back when you've done good work?
DWE: You only do that very briefly. I guess I go, gosh–that was quite a success, and then you see the mistakes. You can't beat yourself up too much but you know when you've made mistakes when you look at it. At the same time, one's got to recognise when they've had successes and I think learning moments are really important when you've achieved something. Certainly, over the years I have had moments where my work has changed and I perhaps have taken those bold steps and they've worked. I've often taken bold steps and they haven't worked, so there's an awful lot of things that you throw away in life. They're always well learned.
CM: You won the Henry Herring Art and Architecture Award. How did that come about? How do you approach a memorial that involves historical research?
DWE: I grew up with a father who had been in the Second World War with all his peers–some of them at D-Day. I was fascinated by war history. I found myself reading more and more, finding old newsreels, of which there were very few, of first-hand accounts from both sides, visiting the site…and I quickly realised it’s not just a memorial, but it was important for the people that survived. There were very few of them left when I was asked to do this. The final unveiling and meeting of the veterans were incredibly moving. These people were there in their teens–now in their 90s–and had gone ashore to effectively die for their country. Today we know so much more about the post-traumatic stress of those that survived. Many would have died post-1945 or post-D-Day from various mental illnesses and things, so it had real resonance. I felt real duty to get it right. A real duty that I owed, or we owed, to an earlier generation for what they sacrificed. Thinking about it today, one might be thinking of Ukraine. If 1944 had been slightly different, would we have had 70+ years of peace, or relative peace, in Europe and the world? All of that resonates with one as an artist. I found, when having to make the sculpture, that I needed detail, I needed history, but I also had to throw it away. I needed to make a really good sculpture. I didn't want soldiers to be shooting at the time or actually doing something. I wanted them to be in the process of about to do something. About to speak, about to touch somebody; to leave the viewer with the idea that this sculpture is alive. The historical detail was important because it gave people something they can recognise, but they can make their own story when they look at it. For example, I put an old enamel mug on the back of one of the sacks. I just happened to see a photograph of a 1944 soldier with a mug strapped onto the webbing on his back, and I wanted little things like that that worked both visually and that also told a bit of a story.
CM: To me, it makes me see them more as human beings and not just as soldiers.
DWE: That's what I aim to achieve, and by saying what you said, it means that I achieved it in some way. On the faces, towards the end, I realised the heads weren't quite right. There wasn't any emotion or feeling so I did a lot of visual research. I went to the Imperial War Museum and found masses of photographs of conflict–of people's faces in conflict–and took lots of elements of those expressions. I tried to put them in that grip, that apprehension, that nervousness, that horror. It was a little bit sterile before I did that. I was learning on the job.
David Williams-Ellis in his studio with his bronze bust of Alan Turing. Courtesy of the artist.
CM: Does sculpting take a toll on your body?
DWE: Definitely! Definitely, definitely, definitely. When you're climbing up the scaffolds, carrying up to two tons of clay. I had an assistant–they need to get underneath you and you're at awkward angles when you're working, so yes! It's not like the Rennaisance, killing oneself with dust from marble, but it's physically tough. I love it. I love the physical side and I probably never would have been a painter. I love painting, but it's not physical enough for me. When I was doing [D-Day Sculpture] I took up running because I realised I wasn't quite fit enough. I needed to be stronger and fitter otherwise it's just frustrating. At the end of the day, working on these big sculptures, you're exhausted. By early evening I'm sort of collapsing.
CM: When you’re sculpting, are you also “looking” with your hands and fingers, tools, or both?
DWE: I'm using my fingers and my tools. When that magic is there and you're thinking totally three-dimensionally, your hands just do it and you do feel it. Occasionally when I want to check something, I close my eyes and feel around–if it feels structurally sound, if it feels the right form. If it doesn't feel the right form, I know something needs to be done. Visually I use a lot of mirrors–because it discombobulates the brain. If you've been working on it for three hours or so and you know it's not quite right, you look at it and just can't see it, or you have a false belief that it is right, then you look in the mirror and you go, that's terrible, or whatever it is, and you can see that it hasn't got the form or the strength.
CM: What excites you at the moment?
DWE: I've got so many exciting things at the moment. I love capturing movement. If I can put the feeling and emotion into something and capture the movement and energy, then I am a very happy person. Those challenges are what I look for.
Thanks to David Williams-Ellis on behalf of MADE IN BED.
Camille Moreno
Features Co-Editor, MADE IN BED