 Okay, this is the maquette for a sculpture recently completed for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. I'm a Royal academician and I'm allowed to put a certain number of pieces in to the exhibition. And I had a couple of quite large blocks of Egyptian alabaster sitting here maybe for five years. And I decided that that was what I was going to work on for the exhibition. And I had an idea about the simplicity of the psychedelic figures for sort of a minimalism almost of how little one needs to do to stone to make a figure. A part of my project for the last 25 to 30 years really is being to see how I can handle or work with the figure in the same kind of way that I worked with surface before. A narrative later and specifically the idea of how little one needs to do to something to make a figure. The psychedelic figures from about two and a half to three thousand BC I suppose are often triangular figures with very very little in terms of identifying marks. But just enough to suggest head, just enough to suggest sexuality for whichever figure. Just enough to suggest arms. And here is actually a true mechanic because this piece here was a piece that I made of the two pieces that were once joined together. As were the two big sculptures which are one meter and ninety so there are six and six high. And they were cut and opened down to evidence that matching nature like the fingerprints of the two halves of the sculpture. So you can see that we have a mirror here of these shapes in the sculpture. So they're called Psyclatic Gemini. So they're twins and twins are a theme that I've been working on. It was on time now in different types of stone and particularly in Hammer Mat Breccia which is highly marked and striated and occasionally dramatic enough to really make a double whammy out of the way that the pages of the stone have been unfolded to create a story of the stones making. And I suppose increasingly from you know whether it was Romulus or Remus or Castor and Pollux even the idea of Adam and Eve can be drawn into the idea of twins, twinning. And so having made this piece originally I then because of time constraints proceeded to make the big sculpture using this as a model. And then when the sculpture was sent off to London for the exhibition I was able to come back and complete a few like a pairing of these two pieces and finding another base of this particular type of Egyptian alabaster. Egyptian alabaster is not like the gypsum of English alabaster which was used in medieval period for many tomb sculptures and used in Italy in a different form, a white alabaster which was also used for decorative purposes predominantly but I think also some sculptural examples exist. But this is often referred to as calcite, it's also referred to as a cavity because of the kind of recesses or the kind of organic matter that stops those things being joined together. My own feeling is that with this particular material there hasn't been any organic matter in here. The evidence of the material that's often found in the holes and in the sculpture in London and in this piece here, this sample, you can see the kind of sand, this is the kind of a desert of sand. Oh yeah. The sand which is so deep in some recesses and sometimes it's all sort of thick enough to almost be like clay. So you do have this kind of curious colouring which occurs within the recesses of these open types of alabaster. So although it's Egyptian alabaster and cyclides if you like run off from Egypt and I suppose carry certain ideas of the development of sculpture from the sort of monolithic dimensionality of a pharaoh seen from the front, seen from the side and carved in a way that I've worked in India as well. That's all in this kind of frontal approach to sculpture. You have the cycladic things which are often contemporary with very early Egyptians in sculpture but also you get the kind of transition from there through to Greece with Koros which also begin to show a kind of movement for the first time. From these rather more static sort of statuesque sort of flat, non-dynamic pieces but profoundly rich with an amazing tactility and primaliness of sculptural expression. Just going to come around to show the wonderful texture on the rear here too. This interesting as well because in a highly marked stem although you have here at the interface where the stem is being cut you have the mirror in. You can see here that you have a totally different kind of figuration on the back here and on the back here which has very very little relationship through although you might say that these shapes have a little bit of a relationship to each other. But the kind of structure of the material, this is very much more kind of pure unmarked sort of solid alabaster here. So it shows a kind of transitional form of the material as it changes from being highly marked to being rather more consistent. And here I'm still playing around with an idea perhaps of here and the line becoming, which is often the case, you'll see like the legs of the figuration in the Cycladic work. So I might still develop this line on both pieces to make this sort of dedication to the Cycladic forms. Just like Peregrine's Sentinel and Dreadnaught from our last module, I wanted to bring in Stephen Cox discussing his own work before discussing it in a little bit more detail myself. And in the interview that you just saw with Stephen talking about this work Gemini, he's talking about the working model for the piece. And that's what you see here. This is a scale model in the material he planned to use of the finished work of Gemini. But this is not the actual work itself. This is sort of a mock-up, a much smaller version of that same sculpture. And I want you to recall that he talks about the importance of the fact that both of these come from the same stone and that the fronts really sort of belong together. On the left I'm showing you kind of a three-quarter view of the front of the pieces. And then on the right I'm showing you a closer view of the backs. And you can see that the backs really diverge a great deal in these two sculptures in the maquette or model version. Here's another closer view of that maquette of Gemini, which of course is a reference to the twins. And I think you can appreciate just how monumental these relatively small models appear. And I think that's because of the extreme solidity of them and the real attention to treating the stone as stone and appreciating the patterning in that stone. You can see here how, for example, some holes and pitting in this alabaster, this is Egyptian alabaster, have become kind of like mouths in the sort of head portion of these two figures. And then we have these chests with protruding nipples on either one. And that also seems to refer to some of the patterning in the stone. And remember with Peregrine Sentinel and also with Dreadnaught, Stephen is working in conversation with his materials. He's responding to what he finds as he sculpts, as he works. Here's our last look at the maquette or model for Gemini. And you can see some of the differentiation between sort of the breasts or nipples on these figures. You can see some of Stephen's pencil marks here and maybe get a slightly better appreciation for the surface that he's working with and also the way that he's treating it. He's roughing out these forms and not making them perfectly smooth the way that we're going to see in the finished works on display in the Royal Academy. Now we're looking at the finished large scale version of Stephen Cox's Gemini. This is like the maquette made out of Egyptian alabaster. And I think that you can see here maybe a little bit more clearly that we have a male figure and a female figure. You can tell that if you look at about midpoint on both of them. On the right the figure has something that projects at roughly where the groin would be. And on the right we have a hollow area at that same point on the sort of female figure. You can also see how the chests on both of them have similar markings on them. And you can see how Stephen took this area of where the stone had kind of broken down and decayed a little bit and discolored and really made that into a feature on the breast of each one of these figures. Kind of turning that area into almost sort of like a breastplate or something. Just like with the maquette these two enormous figures which are over five feet high as I recall from when I was in the gallery. They are carved from the exact same block. And if you take a look at the patterning on this front side of the two figures. It's roughly, you can tell that they were sort of split down from the same area so they almost mirror each other in their patterns. And this is quite deliberate and it's wonderful the way that they seem to kind of respond to each other in terms of the patterning in this Egyptian alabaster. Here on the left we're looking at the rear of the two figures. And on the right you're seeing the full front of one of them kind of in three quarter view and then just a sliver of the other. And I think again you can see just how Stephen is taking advantage of the intricacy and the amazing patterns in that alabaster. This is a sculpture that is as much about the alabaster as it is Stephen shaping that alabaster. And I think you can clearly see that sort of conversation that he is engaged in with his materials. And also his interest in kind of exploring the patterns and the ways that these two figures respond to each other since they're coming from the same block. You should notice that as on the maquette the backs of these two figures are quite different while the fronts have a lot more similarities in their patterns. Now we're looking at a closer view of the figure that I called the male figure earlier. And you can see again just the wonderful way in which Stephen is utilizing what would be considered sort of imperfections in the stone. Areas where the stone has been worn away by weathering, by oxidation and so on. And really turning these into features of the stone rather than imperfections. It shows a real response to these materials that I think is characteristic of all of his work. Here's our last slide and I just want you to notice again how different the backs of these two figures are. I mean they're both absolutely gorgeous and you can see kind of the way that the patterns flesh out on both sides for these figures. It's really fascinating to look at these works and also to compare them to that maquette. Because the maquette as complex as it is you don't get all of the same large patterning that you do here in this nearly life-size example of Gemini. And it truly is a magnificent work. I wonder and this is something that I probably should have asked him when I was at his studio in the Ludlow area. But I find myself wondering if he would be willing to have something like this be placed out in the elements. Because I think that weathering and of course if it were in a city with acid rain and things like that would affect these two figures in very different ways. And so they would sort of change and morph over time. That's probably something that's never going to happen. I would imagine these would be purchased by a collector or a museum and housed indoors away from harm's way. Particularly given the fact that alabaster can be somewhat fragile when exposed to things like acid. So it's just a notion of mine. But I hope that you enjoyed this work and that you appreciate just how fortunate we are to have someone working in these very rare materials today.