stone sculpture
St Mary
Fyfe Sands, a young sculptor who trained at the Building Crafts Council was commissioned to
produce a statue of St Mary for the John Fisher School in Purley.
Portland Stone statue of St Mary by Fyfe Sands
In the past, artists such as Michelangelo employed apprentices to help them with the hard graft of roughing out the shape of a sculpture from the stone block before they finished the piece themselves. Today the pain has been taken out of the process by digital technology.
Sands contacted stoneCIRCLE and provided us with a 12” clay model of the statue, which we scanned and produced a 3D digital model for approval.
We then took a 6ft block of Portland Broadcroft supplied by Portland Stone Firms Ltd. and put it on our Omag 5 axes machine where we machined the back before flipping it to machine the front face.
The machine carving process took roughly a week after which the statue was moved to a workshop in the factory where the sculptor finished it by hand. It was then crated up and delivered to the school for installation.
Creating the sculpture
project details
Artist: Fyfe Sands
Stone contractor: stoneCIRCLE
Materials: Portland Stone