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Vanessa Pooley: Fine Balance
Green Pebble August/September 2010 issue

Vanessa Pooley, Norfolk Sculptor

Vanessa Pooley has exhibited widely, including in the Affordable Art Fair in London, Thompsons Gallery in London and as part of Art London. She is a Fellow of the Royal British Society of Sculptors. For more information, visit www.vanessa-pooley-bronze-sculptures.com.

With teenage sons banging around in the house, Vanessa Pooley does what most parents can only dream of: she disappears into her studio at the back of the property and recreates the brightness of a child’s first years.

Working in clay, she creates sculptures in which she tries to capture the love of a mother for her child, with her most successful shapes consisting of a blend of curves and angles that represent mother and child as one; often at play, always intimate.

‘I’m lucky, every day I get to revisit the feelings a mother has for a toddler,’ she says in her central Norwich home where an old kitchen is now her studio. ‘Creating my sculptures allows me to forget about the arguments and behaviour issues, because it’s very easy to carry on an argument with a teenager and hold it against them. By working on my sculptures, I am able to hold in the front of my mind the deep and forgiving affection a parent has for a toddler.’

Vanessa comes from a large family and is an identical twin. Not surprisingly, family dynamics and identity have played central roles throughout her life. ‘Being an identical twin has made me think a lot more about image...or, rather, self-image. Meeting my sister is like seeing a part of myself.’

Her enduring fascination has been not just with motherhood, but with the female form. She remembers playing on the beach at Walberswick and creating female shapes with clay collected there. At that time she also found herself repeatedly drawing ‘ladies in triangle dresses,’ something she puts down to ‘this terrible need to talk about yourself as a child. Remember those little dressing up kits? The cardboard cut-outs onto which you stuck different little dresses? As a child, you want to draw yourself and then see yourself and symbolise yourself and perhaps move yourself along slightly. My work was about myself, really.’

Although her mother had been artistic, Vanessa’s parents insisted when she left school that she study something sensible in preparation for ‘a proper job.’ She chose sociology but did not enjoy it and switched to a degree course at Norwich School of Art (now Norwich University Campus of the Arts). This caused some consternation within the family, but she persevered and graduated in 1981 with a BA (Hons) in sculpture. After that she completed a post-graduate diploma in Sculpture at City and Guilds of London...

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(Please note this article appears in the August/September 2010 issue)

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Vanessa Pooley: Fine Balance Green Pebble August/September 2010 issue

Vanessa Pooley: Fine Balance
Green Pebble August/September 2010 issue