The sculpture springs loosely from this image of a rising female figure with wings.
Fides installed in the courtyard of C.Hoare and Co.
The sculpture was commissioned in collaboration with Mazzullo + Russell Landscape Designers for their newly re-designed courtyard garden in one of Central London’s oldest establishments.
The sculpture is based on the figure of FIDES; the Roman personification of trust, honesty and good faith. It follows the myth of Pandora’s Box, in which Fides (or her greek counterpart Pistis) is one of the good spirits that fled the vessel and returned to Olympus, leaving humanity without these virtues.
As with many Greek or Roman myths, nothing is so easily pinned down, and Fides is quite an abstract figure. For the Romans, she was an embodiment of attributes; a spirit that moves mysteriously in society, hard to capture or define, and I wanted a form that reflected this ambiguity.
The sculpture was cast in aluminium in order to achieve a sense of physical levity and mercurial liquidity. Aluminium is much lighter than bronze. It’s strength to weight ratio permits very narrow, linear supports which allow the sculpture to both reveal and distort as the viewer moves around it.
When cast, Aluminium throws up considerable technical challenges for the fabricator, but fortunately I was assisted by an incredibly skilled and knowledgeable team at Castle Foundry.