Spike

New York rooftop

Collection of Parliament House, Canberra

Although two-dimensional work is perfectly valid, to perpetually ignore the aspect of sculpture in the round is to ignore the most powerful tool the sculptor has available. In the years previous to those spent in New York, I had worked up preliminary ideas by drawing, and, in retrospect, I have realised that this two-dimensionality, coupled with the relative inflexibility of large works, brought about an inevitable frontality. Irrespective of whether the final sculpture was large or small, I felt that the repeated frontality of earlier works could best be overcome with maquette studies. In this way the conceptual development would arise out of a three-dimensional, and not essentially a frontal, format.

Geoffrey Bartlett, 1984, quoted in Ken Wach "Silver Cloud" in Geoffrey Bartlett: Silver Cloud