Some ideas for sculptures appear out of nowhere. Others seem to have been quietly waiting inside us for years. My carousel horse definitely belongs to the second kind.
There is a great deal of childhood nostalgia behind this piece. Traditional carousels with their beautifully sculpted horses have always felt slightly magical to me. As a child, I rarely had the chance to see them, which made every encounter feel extraordinary. Apparently, that feeling never quite disappeared. Even now, when I come across an old-fashioned carousel somewhere on my travels, my heart still beats a little faster. Most recently, I found one in Sopot, Poland, and there it was again – exactly the same feeling.
So at some point I thought: why not make a carousel horse of my own?
As usual, having the idea was considerably easier than making it happen. 🙂
At approximately 180 cm high and 120 cm wide, this is a fairly large-scale sculpture. The horse is being built gradually, layer by layer. The main structural work is now largely behind me, which means I have finally reached one of my favourite stages: refining the anatomy, proportions and character. With each new layer, the rough construction disappears a little more and the sculpture moves closer to the form I originally imagined.
But making the horse itself was only part of the challenge. I wanted to create as much of the piece as possible with my own hands, from beginning to end. The sculpture needed a proper wooden base and supporting structure, so I took a woodworking course and learned woodturning specifically so that I could make the base myself.
That is one of the things I love about sculpture. You begin with an idea, and very quickly discover that bringing it to life may require skills you simply do not have yet. So you learn them. Sculpture is not only about shaping a form. It can involve construction, unfamiliar materials, engineering problems, experimentation, mistakes, new solutions – and, quite often, learning an entirely new craft along the way.
My carousel horse is still very much a work in progress, and there is plenty left to do. But I have reached the satisfying stage now, when a construction gradually stops looking like a construction and begins to become a character.
This nostalgic figurative, mixed-media sculpture still has some way to go.
And what will my carousel horse eventually become?
Keep watching. I’m rather curious myself to see where this horse takes me. 🙂
— Eliza Bono
