Jas. Davidson: sculptor. Modern figurative sculpture. His work has been described as ...very striking...startlingly realist, with...an hallucinatory quality...

Artist's Statement... It started with a piece of wood and a penknife. In 1979. It took years.
My friends described it as whittling. I could not argue. I made a little figure, just as big as the piece of wood would allow. I developed a fascination for hollow trees. They expressed concealment but offered emergence. These things seemed to go together: to express something of what it had felt like to be adolescent. For me. Urgent but trapped. Angry? Perhaps. Bewildered? Certainly.

I read the White Goddess. And Jung. And thought about symbolism. I studied folk lore. Around me I found vanity and hubris and hypocrisy. An avenue of possibilities opened: ways to express myself without giving too much away. It used to work, could it still?

No: the avenue proved to be a blind alley. Only a very few can still read the language of Symbols. In the West. It's no good if you have to explain. If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction? said JM Coetzee. A better, clearer, shorter way. Meanwhile, looking for myself, I found others and other things.

They were no great help. I find I can’t make a pretty scene or worry about foxes. These things seem unimportant. I can only talk about what I know. In 2003 we went to war. Again. Another war fought in my name. Without my consent.

This was something I could deal with. Too many things have been done in my name without my consent. Actions, assumptions. This is something about which I know. But you need a very loud voice to be heard above the hubbub, and they are not listening. Yet it did suggest a new route to an old goal. I started to explore the things we hide. From ourselves. The things we fail to acknowledge; where we let ourselves down.

It has all been useful. It has lead me here. Where all pretence can be given up. A better, clearer, shorter way. I hope.

There is always distraction. For some there will always be. Progress has been slow, yet it is being made. The shorthand is emerging. The goal is getting closer. And it is no longer whittling. Artist's Statement...