Sophie Dickens
Sophie Dickens was advised not to go to art school; “It will kill you off,” she was told by her school art teacher. So she went to the Courtauld Institute, where she studied the High Renaissance by day, and painted the human figure by night. “I never stopped going to life classes. I was always trying to get to grips with anatomy,” she says. “But the biggest mistake I made was when I left the Courtauld. I was working at a Bond Street Gallery, selling Victorian paintings to tourists. It was awful. One day, I just walked out.” And into a commission from a museum in Plymouth to sculpt, of all things, the head of Walter Raleigh. Getting to grips with the eminent Elizabethan proved an epiphany. “I had to make him out off clay,” she says. “Doing it was just instant happiness. It gave me the feeling of well-being which comes when you realise, immediately, that this is what you must do.” Interestingly, when she looks back at her earlier paintings, she now identifies them as “the paintings of a sculptor.”
Dickens signed up for two years’ training in sculpture under Clive Duncan at the John Cass Foundation in Whitechapel, and the anatomy course at The Slade, where she would study cadavers. Fortunately for her, figurative work was going through one of its unfashionable moments. “It was great. I was the only person in the life drawing room. So I could get the model to do whatever I wanted. I used to get one man to act just like a chicken.” Gradually her passion for clay graduated to a fascination for working in the malleable yet crisp medium of wood. “I wanted the anatomy to show, but not as if the figure had been flayed,” she comments. It takes confidence to combine immediacy alongside references to the art historical cannon, but Dickens pulls it off triumphantly. Icarus, Europa, a cartwheeling figure, a leaping hare, ravens in the sitting room; the fluency and dynamism of Dickens' oeuvre belies a fundamental appreciation not only in the aesthetic of living beings, but an ebullient joy regarding shape itself.
Rosie Millard, Arts journalist