This item has sold out.

On a visit to Chester Cathedral in the summer of 2019 I was struck by the many small carvings in the stone walls on the exterior, particularly around the doors and windows. On returning home, I made up a block of plaster and when it was ready I sat down to make a carving. I made no preparatory drawings but worked directly with my fine carving tools, looking for the forms hidden inside the plaster block. What emerged was an angel, with the wings of a swan, a little like some of the designs I'd seen in Chester. She seems to be communing with a small figure who stands at the top of a stone tower. The disparity in scale is typical of a medieval approach to images, where no attempt is made to mimic the world merely as it appears. In the lower right corner of the carving a memento mori emerged in the form of a human skull, another typically medieval piece of imagery.