Working without pre-conception -
returning sensitivity to sculpture through humility

Most sculpture is conceived; the sculptor works around an idea and may consciously try to work out what is needed to express a particular emotion or feeling for the piece. By not pre-conceiving, the sculptor trades the known for the unknown, and puts enormous effort into the process of trying to suppress our natural desire to be 'in control'.  

The argument against pre-conceiving is one explored by Thornhill who argues that this is ultimately deadening to creativity. His work with clay revolves around subconscious or unconscious elements entering, which gradually lend form to the job. By consciously fighting attempts for it to take an illustrative form (e.g. perhaps starting to look like a figure or group), many layers enter the work through its life, until something will crystallise or force through so powerfully to suggest its final form. In order to achieve this, the sculptor needs to have willpower to go against their immediate feelings, perhaps turning the work over to start afresh in a different manner.

Jon Edgar has consciously tried to apply these practices in carving and working with clay.

"Working from the block, one's freedom is already challenged. You can only remove! There is a perverse pleasure in rejecting the known, and trying to carve 'away' from that immediately suggested, but with some blocks, one's options are slim - torso forms have for me an inevitability where the block is long and narrow. But I feel much happier in knowing that I will find something sculpturally more powerful through letting the unknown take the lead. In one way it is terribly hard, but the hard bit is only in fact about letting go. That, and starting to carve at all when you don't know where you are going. We don't like to let go..."

Works like Conclave Family of Man II (2005) have an ambiguity which is quite disconcerting for the sculptor - not quite knowing where forms have emerged from and what they might suggest. In this case, the naming came from the fact that this was worked after returning from Rome, where Edgar happened by chance to be staying during Pope John Paul II's funeral. There was a medieval feel to the city's people at the time and the resultant forms emerging from this block just seemed to have some form of connection. 

Portrait work in clay may seem an odd contrast, but pre-conceiving has the same creativity-deadening connotations here. "Our eyes see, but due to our conditioning, we don't often draw or sculpt what we see; we draw what we think should be there. Thus, to work from the human head without pre-conceiving, the anguish comes in trying to reconnect the eyes to the fingers and letting the resulting forms show the qualities that should be apparent in every work. Just through living, every human has a natural balance and rhythm which has developed over the person's lifetime. Through certain situations like disease, time or childbirth, this balance might be changed.. and such imperceptible changes can come through when sculptors work with humility and sensitivity. Once again, I find it easier to take the position of relying on some inner quality to suggest quite what clay should go where, rather than consciously shuffling the balance of a sitter's features to suggest something I feel should be conveyed."

How the sculptor 'progresses' is suddenly unimportant. The only thing that seems important is to keep exploring, keep looking, keep doing, keep 'drawing' in clay to bring new shapes and forms into the mind. A sculpture archive might thus read like a personal diary of an individual - ultimately of little practical use, but conveyed with much care and hopefully enriching others now and in future years.