What I mean by that is what makes our life is how the intangible bits of who we are. So things like our thoughts, our memories, our ideas, our feelings, our reactions, how those kind of weave in with the physical world. That is literally what it is to be human, and it’s the thing that colours our life, that gives it flavour, that gives it texture, but despite it being exactly what it is to be human, we still don’t really understand it. 

It doesn’t matter which route you go through, whether it’s religion or philosophy or science, we still don’t have an explanation for exactly what is going on there. These questions, I remember them fascinating me as a child, as a small child, way before, way before I ever picked up a piece of metal. And it’s this, these touching points that I like to explore in my work. 

A reasonable question that I imagine some of your listeners might have is, what on earth does making sculpture have to do with all of that? And my answer would be that when you make what you are doing as a microcosm of that interaction, because you have an idea as a maker, you have an idea whatever form that goes into, and then you have a piece of material that you are working with. So it is literally a microcosm of that relationship between the intangible and the tangible that so characterises our lives as humans. 

So my hypothesis is that by digging into exactly what happens when you make, we can perhaps understand something of that relationship through another route.

Muaz

That’s really interesting because it’s always fascinated me how interconnected things like sculpting and spirituality, you know, over the ages, how interconnected they’ve been from constructing visual interpretations of what a particular understanding of spirituality is to a particular group of people, for example. And how that is interpreted in the physical world as a physical object, whether that’s a deity or various other iterations that we’ve had over the millennia. So that is really interesting.

Juliette: I was re-listening again to the History of the World in the Hundred Objects podcast, which is just such a rich program and it’s fascinating the way in which the nature of the lives of the people that were making these objects are reflected in the objects, in their form, in their material, in the way they’re made, and how that relationship can be extracted. In some cases, tens of thousands of years subsequently, to understand some of what was going on for those people that were making these objects.

And this for me is something really fascinating about working with objects, we think we’re separate to them and we’re really not. That porosity, if you like, between person and object is very real. Let me give you a couple of examples. My kind of standard example is the cup that you have your first cup of coffee or cup of tea out of in the morning.

Almost everybody has a favorite cup that they want that first cup of tea out of. There’s rarely anything physically different about that cup, but it’s an object that allows us to bridge between nighttime and activity. And similarly, objects like anything that’s inherited or souvenirs that you bring back from a holiday.

These objects act as kind of containers or kind of almost like external USBs that we project our memories and our thoughts onto. And then when we see them, they kind of spark up that, they spark up those feelings again. And so we have this kind of almost two-way relationship with, with these objects. And that’s one of the reasons that I like to work in abstract work specifically because in abstract work, because you’re not telling a directed story, the space for whoever’s viewing the work, to project their own story onto it. 

And one of the things that I enjoy most about doing face-to-face shows is hearing the stories that people see in my work. And they range vastly, and as will always be the case with any creative work. For some people, there’s not a connection to the work and they won’t see a story.

But for other people, that connection can be very strong. And it’s not about me, it’s not about me as the maker. It’s about something that the person sees in a particular piece of work that resonates with their personal or experience or their interpretation of the world. And a bridge then is almost formed between the person and the piece.

And that’s something really special for me about working in abstract work. 

Muaz

That’s really interesting and you actually see this so often. As you mentioned, it could be a mug and like even you see so much of this in professional sport as well, the meaning that they might just give to something almost arbitrarily if it happened.

So for example, if you’ve got like a tennis player who won spectacularly wearing a particular item and then for the next 10 years, they always make sure that they’re wearing that somehow on their body. You know? It’s an arbitrary object, but the fact that they’ve given meaning to it all of a sudden just transforms it.

Juliette

Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s fascinating. And so we have this, you know, we sort of think of ourselves as separate from the material world, but we’re so woven into it, and of course the mechanism for all of this is the body and the body itself a material form. So that way of conceptualizing the kind of body almost as this object that is both material and contains those kind of what we think of as those immaterial aspects of our experience. Although of course they have physical correlates in the form of hormones and the way in which our brain works, we nonetheless experience that. We experience our emotions as, and our feelings and our thoughts as intangible, even if they have those kind of physical correlates that science particularly likes to map.

So what I think we experience as being binary and separate is actually nothing of the kind, and that’s certainly my experience of making.

Muaz

Great. So how did this journey progress? So I assume this hypothesis built over time and it’s not something that just happened. So what was the stages that drove you to when you were entering this field that kind of drove you in this particular direction?

Juliette

So, I think you’re right. It’s always iterative and, the sort of, subtler phrasings of the question are informed by the work you do and vice versa. I came to making late. I came to make in my thirties. Before that, I had worked in the abbreviated version. I’d worked in healthcare, doing service design and service redesign, which is essentially, you either have service that isn’t running as well as it needs to be, or needs to be modernized in some way, or you have a service that’s completely new and you want to deliver.

And in either case, it’s about looking at how the service fits together with the people it’s trying to serve. I loved working in healthcare. But I also knew I was kind of after something else and I stumbled on a jewellery course and did that. And I have to confess to not being a jeweller and not being very good with small fiddly things. I think they don’t suit either the way my hands move or my temperament.

And, but in that, I heard, that there was a discipline of making objects out of metal, and I immediately knew that was I wanted to do. So I went back and I did some more study and what really struck me when I started to study systematically was that what I found when I was making, well there were a few things, but first of all, what I found when I was making that was that it was a completely different way of thinking to the ways of thinking I had been trained in, up until that point, it was a much more active way of thinking. That was much more a negotiation with the material as instead of being an instruction to it. And that I think, tapped into that question I have had as a child about what on earth was going on there. Well, how on earth did these things fit together? And really it sort of came from that.

It fascinates me when I look back at some of the earlier work that I did. And in retrospect, I can see these things coming up before I even knew they were there. So often, and this is what I like about the approach that I take to making, which I’ll come onto cause we haven’t spoken about it yet, which is that it is this dialogue between what I think I’m doing and what my subconscious thinks I’m doing effectively. 

And in a sense making as a way of drawing out your subconscious, putting it in material form, and then reading that in order to get a read off it. And that’s very much how I make. I always start with material. Like making jewellery, I’m not one of the world’s gifted illustrators or drawers, and so I always start with material that might be plaster, it might be wire, it might be paper, it might be some other modelling materials.

And I just start making, and I start making until it feels right. It is very much a feeling thing. If it feels wrong, there might be some mental analysis about what’s going, what’s going on there, for example, is, are the proportions not right? My ideas for the materials not right? 

But fundamentally it’s a feeling about when it works. I will then, once I’ve got that in a paper sculpture, I’ll start working into the metal and it always changes. Absolutely always changes because metal has opinion and pieces have opinion. Sometimes that changes small. Sometimes it can be quite dramatic, if I’m honest.

And when the piece is made, and usually when I’ve photographed it, that’s when I can see what I’ve done. That’s what I can see what I was thinking and what I was drawing out. And what I tend to do is I sit down and I analyze my, the image of my work in the way that I would analyze someone else’s work.

And I sit down and I write and I describe what I see. And in that I tend to figure out what earth it was I was talking about. 

Muaz

Right. So I guess, when it comes to physical objects, you are constrained by the actual material that you are working with. So have there been cases where that has impacted your creativity?

So where you’ve moved from your first model, for example, your paper model onto the actual material that you want to work with, and you mentioned the negotiation aspects of it. So how do you handle those constraints? So for example, what if a negotiation does not go well? 

Juliette

One of the things that I mentioned, the how different it was when I came to work in material.

One of the big differences was that up until I started working with material, my life has been very driven by language. I studied literature as undergrad by story, by the way in which you communicate. Language is an amazing thing. It is extraordinary that we communicate the way that we do, but it’s also pretty infinitely malleable.

And we see that in the way in which the meanings of words change the way in which language changes and develops over the years, as well as a whole load of other things. It came as a real shock to me when I first started making that there are things that material just simply will not do. And it doesn’t matter how, flower and fancy and persuasive you get with it, it simply will not do it.

You cannot, for example, heat aluminium above 200 degrees without ending up with a puddle of melted metal. There are physical limitations. On top of that, of course, there are limitations of skill, but that’s a different thing because you can address that. So I have to confess that it really messed with my head for about a year.

Until I began to work with it. I think that it’s a common misconception in creativity that what you need for good creation is freedom. Whereas actually what you need is some really well placed limits. The terror of the empty notebook or the blank sheet of paper is a pretty well documented, but put some limits on that.

Whatever you are creating, you have to create in 30 seconds. You can only work with your left hand, you can only work with certain materials. Doesn’t really matter what they are, but put some limits on. You’ve got something to riff off. You’ve got something to dialogue with, and you know, there’s a reason that in storytelling and in drama, things go wrong because it creates tension and it’s from that tension that creativity can spark, you know, a blank sheet of paper there’s just no tension in that. 

There’s nothing to kind of, there’s no grit, there’s nothing to grasp onto. So absolutely you can use material limits like that. And I think that those limits get internalized at the more you work with material. So when I’m modelling a piece and I’m thinking what materials I want to work with, there’s almost like a Rolodex clicking in my head going, well, yes, I could do that, but then you’d have that technical problem, or I could do that but then you’d have that technical that would be hard, that would be easier. 

So those sort of deliberations almost happen automatically as you work with material. Having said that, pushing against those limits is also really fun and sometimes deciding to perhaps work with a less cooperative material because you feel that there’s something in the way that material expresses itself that you need for the piece even though you know you’re setting yourself up for troubles, sometimes that is a choice you’ll make. 

I think that you asked about negotiation and whether the negotiation ever goes badly. Well, of course it does, but if it’s going badly, it means that you’re not at the end of that negotiation. There’s still more ground to cover and sometimes you have to give, you might have to give on what your perception of the outcome is. You might have to give on the way in which you solve the problem. You might have to give on pretty much any front. Because on certain fronts, the material will not shift. I think that this brings us onto something which is a really interesting aspect of making, which is your ability to problem solve.

When I was relatively early on in my career, I was making a series of pieces for a particular exhibition they’d been agreed with the curator. And I was working at a bigger scale than I’d worked to up until that point. And there was one piece that it just went wrong, and then it went wrong, and then it kept going wrong. And it didn’t really matter what I did, it went wrong.

And in the end, I had to shot it in a cupboard, because it was hoovering up time and I still had another three pieces to make. And in the end, I said, it will come out when everything else is finished, then I will know how much time I have left and the solution will have to fit the time I have available. Otherwise, I risk sabotaging the entire collection for this one really stubborn piece. 

And that was a really good lesson in kind of assertive behaviour, if you like. But what was interesting was it pushed the solution that I came up with in the end, and made it a stronger piece. And this is what I often, often find, that where things go wrong, the thinking that you have to do pushes the piece into much more. It just, it has much more content. It has much more richness, much more interest, and I think that’s back to what I said about the limits comes out of this tension. And you develop, otherwise, you go mad as a maker, you develop a confidence in problem solving that takes you away from getting it right and moves you towards doing something effective.

And that’s such an important lesson for creativity. You know, the way in which our education is structured here is very much about doing the right thing, getting the right answer, you know, getting your exam score right, by giving the right answer. Whereas in making the right answer is the thing that works.

And it’s quite a big step. It’s quite a big jump in your thinking and it’s very liberating, if I’m honest.

Muaz

Absolutely. And constraints build creativity.

Juliette

I think for creativity, you need two things. You need creativity arrives out of newness. Creativity is producing something that is new, different, that isn’t just a replica.

To do that, you need a little bit of space because there has to be a space in which that newness can arrive. If you, you know, if you think about a forest that’s tightly packed with trees, nothing new is going to grow. For new things to grow, you have to manage the woodland and take some trees out. The same as the case with making, but just give a barren field and nothing happens.

So you need limits. But if they’re too tight, you’ve not got space and you need space. But if there’s too much of it, you’ve got nothing to, to spark off. And I think, you know, there’s a sort of trope isn’t there about creatives kind of breaking the rules, so to speak. And really what I think that is about, is about finding the space in tight limits.

And one of the ways of doing that is breaking one of the rules, because by doing that you push out one of the limits. 

Muaz

Absolutely. Absolutely. So when you approach a new piece of work, is there a particular process that you follow and how does it compare if, for example, it’s a personal project versus a commission, for example, or an exhibition?

Juliette

So I tend to work either creating my own work or working with a curator, preparing a specific body of work for exhibition. I don’t do many one-to-one commissions. And generally, I think the way that I describe it is every time I make a new body of work, there are some threads that come out of that, that are left unresolved.

And that will have been something, it could be something technical, it could be something physical. It could have been a mechanism that you designed to solve a particular problem, but then you think has, you know, other applications, it might be a material combination, it might be movement in the piece.

Something will be left that catches your curiosity. And I tend to use those threads as the start for the next project. Something that’s left hanging, if you like, from the previous project. Start with a good question. How do I do this? How do I do that? And then crack on, basically. Crack on with the material and see where it takes you.

Muaz

Oh great. So you basically start with a vision of what a particular collection is and then organically will yourself in that direction.

Juliette

I very rarely start with a vision of what I think it will look like. I might start with a specific number of pieces in mind or I suppose it depends what do we mean by the term vision?

So a recent collection I did, I wanted it to be all wall pieces. So I knew that everything was gonna be sculpture for the wall, and there were a couple of other constraints that I put in that. And that part of that was to do with the time I had available for making and, you know, kind of real life constraints, if you wanna put them like that.

Did I have a vision of what it would look like? Absolutely no idea. Truly no idea. But I had a couple of questions that had arisen from the previous two pieces I’d made. There were things about those two pieces that I thought were interesting, that I wanted to push a bit further, that I wanted to see how far I could take them, and the collection grew out of that, basically.

I think what this means is, slightly tricky to tease out, but one of the reasons that I work directly with material is that your hands do as much of the thinking as your brain does. It amazes me how often a lot of my work is built from components and it amazes me how often I will put on the bench two components next to each other, just cause I’ve put them next, I’m working on a third component. 

I turn around and there’s a piece sitting there from the two components that I’ve just randomly put down. Nothing I was conscious of. But there is some way in which your hands or your body know, and the more making you do. Now, of course, what we mean by the hands knowing needs some digging into, and now isn’t necessarily the time for that, but it’s those muscles that you build when you make and because your body has a literacy and that literacy is what is in negotiation and conversation with the material rather than it necessarily being your brain. 

I work quite hard that I act and I reflect on what I’ve modelled or what I’ve made at a separate thing. Otherwise, it’s like trying to write an edit at the same time. It’s two different standpoints. It’s two different brains. That’s two different ways of approaching, and you try and do it at the same time and you just trip over your own feet.

Muaz

Wow, that is really fascinating because I’m totally the opposite. I need to see the end point or I get anxious and build myself towards it. But that is really fascinating and I guess that’s one of the fascinating things about us as a species as well. The fact that, you know, we’re not monolithic in how we approach things. Which is what makes life great.

Juliette

Absolutely. And this sort of brings me back to the opening question really. What is that about? You know, how does that work?

Muaz

Yeah, absolutely. So does technology play a role in any of this, or are you purely a hands-on kind of person?

Juliette

Pretty much hands-on, if I’m honest, I don’t work in CAD or anything like that. I have done a little bit, but I found it very hard not being able to touch the object. And I think you’re absolutely right in what I think is your implication, which is that the way in which you make tells you something about how you are in the world. 

And I think the sort of everyday parallel that I use for making is cooking. And you have people that cook following recipe, line by line, gram by gram. No variation. Exactly what it says in the book. And you have people who read the recipe and go, nah, I’ve got the general sense. I’m definitely one of those latter people.

Muaz

And then you have the people who just say, you know, let’s see what happens today.

Juliette

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So perhaps I fall somewhere in between you and those other people. I like a bit of a plan, but yeah, yeah. Nothing too certain. 

Muaz

Your approach and the way you handle things has been really fascinating and I’m sure everyone listening to this will get a lot of value out of this.

You can find Juliette online at:

• Website: www.juliettebigley.com
• Instagram: @juliettebigley

You can listen to the whole interview podcast over on our podcast page or by clicking here at Sculpting as a medium for exploration.