Cirrus@Austlit

'In 1992 Michael Schmidt introduced me to Les Murray, in the hope that he would sit for me as part of a series of portrait sculptures I was planning to make of poets. Many years before a fellow student had asked me, with a mixture of irony and incredulity, why anyone would model a head out of clay toward the end of the twentieth century. I recall feeling that my urge to do this was something as natural as life itself, and I wondered what was missing in her. As I do not work from photographs but insist on sittings with the subject, early on I learned that this project would be unrealistic in many cases. I came close with Seamus Heaney, but ultimately he was unavailable. However he appreciated my portrait of Czeslaw Milsoz and proposed a title for the series that summed up the challenge, as he saw it – ‘a covenant with likeness’. The engagement had a moral dimension that I felt strongly, and especially so with Les Murray.' (Introduction)