Mother and Child is generated from 3D scans of two existing sculptures: Henry Moore’s Woman (1957–58) at Tate Britain and a nineteenth-century plaster cast at the Victoria and Albert Museum after Michelangelo’s Crouching Boy. The scans were used primarily as digital ‘cutting tools’, repeatedly repositioned and overlapped to remove material from a virtual volume. The originating figures disappear as recognisable images, but their bodily forms remain embedded within the geometry of the sculpture as cavities, traces and fragmented residues. Small fragments derived from Crouching Boy are also retained positively, introducing moments of presence within a form generated predominantly through absence.

The pairing brings together two otherwise unrelated sculptures—one of a woman and one of a child—to create a new Mother and Child relationship. Rather than depicting that relationship directly, the work is concerned with what remains between and after the figures have been abstracted. At first the sculpture presents as a dense, complex mass; with closer looking, bodily forms are sensed without becoming fully identifiable. Knowledge of the Moore and Michelangelo sources introduces a further layer of meaning without resolving the abstraction.

The digital model was divided into 6 mm sections, laser-cut from MDF and reconstructed layer by layer. These visible strata further fragment the original figures. The assembled sculpture was then coated with copper powder suspended in epoxy resin and polished, giving the digitally generated and laminated form the material presence of a metallic object. The work continues my investigation into how sculpture can evoke presence through absence, and how the body can remain perceptually active without being directly represented.

Image sources: Artwork images by author. Henry Moore, Woman, 1957–58. 3D source sculpture scanned at Tate Britain and used as a generative form in Mother and Child. After Michelangelo, Crouching Boy. Nineteenth-century plaster cast, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Scanned and used as a generative form in Mother and Child.