WILLIAM PEERS
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"I went to art school in Falmouth, Cornwall, and specialised in sculpture. No one knew how to carve – neither teachers nor students.
It was not until five years of post college wilderness had passed by that I began to learn.
It happened under the guidance of a brilliant eccentric called Michael Black, who lived in Oxford. He had sculpted the Emperor’s heads around The Sheldonian years before I met him, but now, due to old age and a car accident he needed help with his work. Michael encouraged me to start my own carving and taught me how to sculpt stone.
I had wanted to sculpt before, but the years at college had introduced so many new ideas, so many styles, so many materials that the millions of possibilities and legions of brilliant predecessors made me not only uncertain of how to proceed, but frozen in panic. Eventually I imposed a set of rules in order to cut down the avenues open to me. For instance, in one sculpture I ruled that the carving should only have convex forms. This revealed more possibilities that I would have imagined and where freedom had been overwhelming, the imposed restriction was liberating."
