BP: What sparked your love and support for wildlife?
RL: Following on from the above, this was sparked at a very early age. I am informed that my passion for conservation began at just short of three years old, when I found what I clearly thought were a couple of starving snails in my mother’s garden and decided to carefully transport them indoors and place them in the vegetable compartment of the fridge in our kitchen to revive them! This early act of kindness soon became a mission, as a child, to actively seek out wildlife in distress, our home quickly becoming an animal hospital for injured hedgehogs, chicks, baby owls and anything else I felt needed care and rehabilitation!
Now, as a parent myself, my desire to nurture and care has been fulfilled in other ways but my passion for wildlife and conservation remains as strong as ever. I am lucky enough to be able to channel this interest and passion through my creative work which, in turn, has led me to become involved in conservation on a larger scale, with my support of conservation organisations like Tusk (www.tuskusa.com) and WildAid (www.wildaid.org), who are fighting to save our endangered species in what is now a critical situation. I made the decision early on in my sculpture career that if I was going to be studying and sculpting wildlife, particularly endangered species, I did not simply want to be a passive observer of my subject matter. In order to create the work I do and breathe life into my pieces, I have to care about the subject matter and that care brings with it an enormous sense of responsibility. My bronze sculptures will outlive me and many generations to come and each piece is created in celebration of a living creature, I could not bear the idea of any of my pieces becoming a memorial to an extinct species.
What started as a childhood passion and care has become, for me, a commitment and promise that I will do everything I can, using the skills I have, to help in the battle to conserve our planet and the wonderfully diverse species that inhabit it.
BP: You often combine a small and fragile creature with a larger one – in perfect balance - as well as the mother and the ‘child’.
Is this your own sense of affection and responsibility towards animals that we see through your creations?
Yes, although I think it is both a combination of my own sense of responsibility and affection that I feel towards the animal and my own strong affinity, as a mother myself, with what I like to describe as ’the art of nurture’. One of my early pieces was a bronze of a female baboon carrying her baby. It was an ambitious piece at the time, since baboons are not a particularly traditional sculpture subject and the scale of the baby meant that the detail I would have to recreate would be very fine indeed.
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