Maquettes for Giuseppe

After my son Giuseppe died, I began making small figures in clay.

I had no particular plan for them, and certainly no thought of making a body of work. I was simply trying to give physical form to something that could not easily be expressed in words. The figures emerged slowly: modelled, pressed, scraped, broken and remade. Some seemed to be portraits, others fragments of memory or states of mind. They were not intended as likenesses of Giuseppe, although inevitably he inhabits them, as do I.

I called them maquettes because they were small and provisional. Their incompleteness became part of what they were. Grief itself seemed provisional: constantly changing shape, resisting any finished or permanent form.

Making them became a way of thinking with my hands. Photography had always depended upon something being there in front of me. With clay, I could make visible something that was no longer there. A face could appear beneath my fingers and disappear again; a body could be damaged and repaired.

Over time the figures accumulated. Without my quite intending it, they began to describe a journey: from the violence and bewilderment of loss towards something quieter —  an accommodation with absence.

This book brings some of those small sculptures together. They are objects made out of grief, but I don’t think they are only about grief. They are also about memory, love and the strange persistence of a relationship after someone has gone.

10″ x 8″ / 76 pages / £25 plus p&p