Undergraduate Degree Show. BA Hons. Sheffield Polytechnic (now Sheffield Hallam University). June 1981

I remember distinctly the excitement I felt as I put the final touches to my degree show at what was then Sheffield Polytechnic in 1981. It was the culmination of three year’s of intense personal and intellectual change. Each one of my sculptures, or so I thought, was a self-contained entity, fragments of experience externalised in three-dimensions. In a sense, this was true. What I had not been prepared for was that the fragments when juxtaposed, formed a hole picture, like the pieces of a jigsaw. The satisfaction of ‘fitting in’ the last piece revealed an unforeseen vulnerability. The completed picture was a celebration of personal experiences in visual form, a three-dimensional journal which I suddenly hoped no-one would read too carefully. What I omitted to take into account, along with those feelings, was that the work had a ‘formal’ language sophisticated enough to transcend the purely personal and to communicate to those wishing to engage with the work, on many different levels…