Leaf Piece, 1943. Found object, painted.
Image copyright Effy Alexakis 2002.

gallery - catalogue - page four

I started to work in wood, and a lot of my inspiration came from the models I'd made, mainly the contour models, like the model of the campus, where one cuts layers of contours to put together in order to get a rise in the landscape. And I felt that this was a very good medium or technique for sculpture which had not been tried before ... a theoretical landscape that was turned into a sculpture. Once I had made things in wood, I cast them in bronze.

Mrs Scheinberg's Holdsworth Gallery exhibited them in 1987. She looked at my work (and of course they were very 'pointy') and she said, 'People don't like points.' But she gave me an exhibition, and I sold quite a few.

Whereas contours normally are put together like the pages of a book, I wanted to open them out. I thought, I can't do these on a large scale in plastic: it's too fragile and too temporary. I'll have to do it in steel. I couldn't imagine cutting thousands of contours out of steel, but fortunately along came the laser cutting machine right at that time. So I designed a set of 100 contours, rather like a piano keyboard with a hundred notes: every contour was a modulated version of the one before it.

Now this is a thing which happens in nature too, in palm trees, in tree fern leaves, and grasses, and birds' feathers and fish scales. And the ribs of a boat. It's exactly the same process. So I designed a set of contours and I had them digitised on a computer so that they could be fed into a laser cutting machine, and I made enough sculptures to exhibit at the Holdsworth. It was 1989, after I'd won a prize at the Hakone Sculpture Park in Japan. More recently, I did a sculpture for an exhibition of small works in Hokkaido in North Japan. They bought it for their own collection.

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