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In the fourth edition of our series on sculptural materials, William takes us on a written journey to the Oxford University Natural History Museum – and in particular, to the geology and sculptural exhibits…
This week we continue our exploration of sculptural materials, but move away from stone, to consider a common casting material: plaster.
Limestone is a fascinating material with many uses in the world of the arts as well as in lots of industrial, agricultural and construction areas…
Unlike other forms of rock, soapstone can be found all over the world, and can be mined either industrially or by hand. It has a long history, and was carved by Indigenous peoples all over the world, to make all sorts of things…
Amongst the many treasures for students available in the Tom Bass Sculpture Studio School reference library, is a book ‘Henry Moore on Sculpture’…
Have you heard of the website NOWNESS? If not, you may find it to be a great platform for some inspiration!
This podcast is presented by art historian and curator, Katy Hessel. Katy interviews artists on their career, or curators, writers, or general art lovers, on the female artist who means the most to them…
The Modern Art Notes Podcast is a weekly interview program featuring artists, historians, authors, curators and conservators…
This podcast is dedicated to strengthening the ties between today's figurative sculptors and the sculptors of ages past…
There are 27 short documentaries in the series, many of which you can watch via YouTube…
Be sure to listen to the new podcast @sculptinglives. The wonderful series explores the lives and careers of five women Sculptors…
Spotlight On
We share art history, as well as profile historical and contemporary sculptors we think you should know more about:
“Virginia Lloyd-Tait’s exhibition at Clara Street Gallery is a retrospective journey in life and sculpture. It's an odyssey of Blood, Sweat, and Tears. But it is also one of Music. Blood first: until 3 years ago Virginia worked full-time in plasma research and supply, while also lending her talent as a board member of Tom Bass Studio Sculpture School until 2020…”
'“Precarious' alludes to the finely balanced forms, some of which appear to defy gravity whilst others could collapse at any moment, hinting at the vulnerability of human existence…”
“Nicky and I have been friends for approx. 30 years and together we have exchanged ideas and influenced each other’s artistic creativity. We have discovered our commonality in the love of the abstract…”
“When you draw a life model, you’re not just experiencing a unique, intimate and challenging creative process, you are also touching the ‘golden thread’ of knowledge and understanding that comes from centuries of tradition in this practice. Countless artists before you have used life drawing to hone their skills and their ability to render creative ideas…”
“I have always loved working with my hands. Both the sculpture and photography allow for this. Lith photography is a very specialized process of hand printing in the darkroom…”
Clara Street Gallery invites you to our upcoming exhibition of sculpture and photography, 'skin' by Jenny Pollak. Please come along to meet Jenny and join us for the exhibition opening on Saturday 9 August, 2 - 4pm.
In March 2025, members of the TBSSS Board were devastated to learn one of Tom Bass’ earliest civic sculptures had been destroyed in a catastrophic fire in October 2023. In light of this tragic loss, and an investigative article by art critic John McDonald, TBSSS uncovers the history of The Herald Sculpture…
Having lived at the Sydney Children’s Hospital for the last 35 years, we collected the sculpture earlier this year with its chips and scratches, having seen a lot of use, appreciation and play in its life.
It's been a busy couple of months for TBSSS teachers and guest teachers, whose work has been included in sculpture prizes and exhibitions. We thought we'd share news of recent achievements, as well as extend our congratulations.
The opening of the Sydney Metro this month saw Tom Bass’ famous ‘Fountain’ sculpture wonderfully restored and reinstated at the new Martin Place Metro Station.
Talking Practice
Get to know the practice of our sculptor friends. Learn about their work and what inspires them:
Congratulations to sculptor and TBSSS teacher Karen Alexander on her work on the recent large scale public artwork on the M7 Motorway on Dharug land, Maria Lock and Robert on Dharug Country.
“My creative process is fluid and organic. If I am carving stone, it starts with the choice of the raw stone and from there I simplify and if it’s too ‘simple’ I complicate. It’s a very hard thing to articulate as my carving process is more like an inner conversation, between me and the stone where we both speak to each other, listen, and adjust as required…”
“I haven’t studied sculpture, I had studied Graphic Design at Randwick TAFE, my sculpting has come from being self-taught, making lots of mistakes and learning by them, observation is the best skill any hyperrealist sculptor can have…”
“Restrictions and fears provided a fertile soil for me to meditate on our fragile existence and I have created several sculptures and painting to express that. But for the same reason I couldn’t travel to my students and they couldn’t come to my studio especially during the last two European winters…”
“I see clay as a social media with its long history in human culture and its universal familiarity. It provides me with infinite possibilities of form and a surface on which to scratch, write and paint…”
“I work across assemblage, installation, collage, printmaking and photography. Most of my sculptures are assemblages, 3D and 2D pieces created from discarded and unwanted toys…”
“I like to believe that the cultural and artistic atmosphere in my family had a big effect on me and on how my life later evolved…”
“I make sculptures by means of crocheting and knitting. When I made my first crocheted artwork, I didn't have any earlier background in yarn-based handcrafts…”
“During lockdown I made a very tongue-in-cheek sculpture about the different ways my husband and I were dealing with being stuck in the house…”
I have been very grateful live where I do over the last 4 months, there has been plenty to do on the land and in my studio…
“I feel very grateful to have been given the opportunity to turn this strange period of isolation into an inspirational little art residency…”
From The Archive
Dive into the rich Tom Bass Sculpture Studio archive to explore rarely seen material:
“It was always with a feeling of excitement that I would turn off the Broadway, busy with traffic, into a small laneway leading to the door of the Tom Bass Sculpture Studio. There was a repair shop for fridges and whitegoods on the ground floor and I seem to remember perhaps a jeweller or a goldsmith in the building as well…”
“Here in this Studio I could make concrete my daydreams and hold my own against the roar and thunder of the city and the sadness and loss I was experiencing at that time. Tom’s teaching looked seriously at free play of imagination, contemplation and dreaming. There was no radio or noise apart from the soft sounds of students at work in this boundless silence, three floors up off Broadway…”
“As you stepped into the light-filled entry way, you climbed up the square timber stairwell to the top floor and entered another world! The tall windows lined the walls and streamed dust-light into the room, while the window pane shadows moved across the floor throughout the day…”
Conceived as "the spirit of the community", the sculpture is a representation of a graceful yet triumphant winged figure with arms raised above her head to receive a descending dove of peace and beauty…
“The P&O Wall Fountain ‘bit’ into the Hunter Street building, making it one of Australia’s greatest public sculptures...”
When The University of Sydney commissioned ‘The Student’ from Tom Bass in 1953, it became the university’s earliest modernist public artwork…
Today we bring you some wonderful pictures of Tom Bass AM creating “The Falconer”, electrolytic copper, 1955…
The Learning Curve
Get to know some of the students that attend workshops at Tom Bass Sculpture Studio and those studying sculpture further afield:
“I’ve always done creative things but I’d never tried sculpting before and I didn’t have any experience with the studio environment so coming into Tom Bass was eye opening.”
“I’m an artist at Studio A, a place for professional artists with intellectual disabilities. At Studio A I do drawing, painting, and papier-mâché sculptures of animals. I also like paintings and drawings of botanical subjects.”
“I grew up with sculpture in my life as my oldest friend’s father, Alan Ingham, was a sculptor. (Alan was Henry Moore’s assistant for four years in the early 1950s and when he came back from the UK he worked with Tom Bass for a while.) Alan’s studio and bronze foundry were down the back of the bush block in Newport where my friend Jane and I grew up. We were always visiting Alan in the studio…”
“The experience was deeply immersive and intense with the sounds of marble being mined and occasionally pushed down the hillside serving as a backdrop while they were carving…”
“Sculpting has been on my radar since I created my major work for year twelve in high school, ‘Lady in the hammock’. There was a gap from then until Tom Bass Sculpture Studio School became an essential part of my week about 7 years ago…”
“Sculpting is an amazing outlet to release stress, and once that goes, the creativity seems to come. I love the feeling of immersion and freedom that you get when you’re carving a piece of stone. It’s physically demanding, tactile and earthy... and in the end you get a three dimensional object that will hopefully bring joy to someone…”
Last month, we were very glad to welcome back Georgina Mills, a figurative realist sculptor and TBSSS guest teacher from Tarntanya/Adelaide, to run two ¾ Life-Size Torso Workshops. We spoke with two of the students who participated about their experience.
“I recently had the absolute pleasure of taking part in Michael Vaynman’s 2 Day Wax Workshop, and it was honestly just what I needed…”
“As Anni Albers said: “art is something that makes you breathe with a different kind of happiness.” I’ve never done any kind of studio art before, so sculpting is a new kind of happiness for me. I love the challenge of drawing from the right side of my brain for a change… though I still cannot follow map directions…”
“I had an epiphany last year when I suddenly realised that I was creating stone sculptures in my drawings... and that I really should be exploring real sculpture... with real stone. It’s already given me an invaluable insight into the genius of past sculptors from primitive ‘stone age’ carvers to the renaissance…”
“I first fell in love with sculpting when I visited Musée Rodin in Paris in 2019. I was mesmerised by the manipulation of form and material to capture the intricacies of human life and emotion…”
“It is only of late that I have grasped why it has always been so important to me: in fact when I mould, sculpt or shape a material, whether it be clay, stone, felt, glass or whichever, I become energetically and emotionally balanced…”
“I love the escapism you get when creating something. I have been creative since I was a child, always making things…”
I was fascinated by how a sculpture could stop me in my tracks and make me physically move around it whilst the surroundings faded into the background…
“Art tells a story. It tells a story of hope, of suffering, of sadness, of happiness. All my art tells a story. The beauty of art is that it lives on long after you die…”
“In 2015 I took a life gamble and applied to the Florence Academy of Art. I was accepted so I moved to Florence, Italy to start learning how to sculpt the figure…”
“I’ve been working with my hands everyday for the last 15 years and have always enjoyed creating things, so making sculptures just seemed like an inevitable path to explore…”
Take A Look
2024 is our 50th anniversary as a Sculpture Studio School! We warmly invite you to celebrate this historic milestone on Saturday 6 July, from 3 – 6pm for the opening of a special exhibition and celebratory event.
There are lots of opportunities in the next few months to submit your sculptures for Prizes all over NSW. Good luck!
There are some fantastic exhibitions happening over the summer and we’ve picked a few highlights…
TBSSS is excited to be able to throw open the doors to once again to welcome students, friends and supporters into the studio for the 2022 Annual Studio Exhibition.
Tom Bass Sculpture Studio School (TBSSS) is now taking applications for the TBSSS and Creative City of Sydney Youth and Accessibility Scholarships. Applications close Friday 2 Sep.
Entries are now open for the 2022 Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize, Australia's pre-eminent award for small sculpture.
The Tate Britain owns over 600 sculptures by renowned avant-garde sculptor Henry Moore! There are currently two large rooms dedicated to displaying some of the famous sculptures in the collection.
The North Sydney Art Prize is a major biennial arts event showcasing some of the best in contemporary art from across Australia. This year’s exhibition features over 110 artworks to be displayed across the grounds of the historic Coal Loader site.
Entries now open for Sculpture in the Vineyards - New South Wales’ longest running regional sculpture festival in New South Wales.
The oldest of the museums in Oxford, and in fact, England’s first public museum (and first university museum), the Ashmolean was founded in 1683 as a museum of art and archaeology. Like many museums in the United Kingdom, you could spend days and days in the museum and still not have explored it all – the museum is simply massive!
So what is sisal, where does it come from, and why is it used in sculpture? Answering this question took me to the most unlikely of places: the Oxford Botanic Gardens…