Sara Ingleby-Mackenzie

Sara Ingleby-Mackenzie

My formative years were spent in Milan where my mother was a fashion designer, and I grew up surrounded by elegant designs, wonderful colours and beautiful and stylish people. One could not help but absorb the culture, which subconsciously influences my work today.

At Art College, back in England, I was fortunate often to find myself alone in the life room and I set about mastering the old virtues of working from the life model in clay. This gave me the confidence and insight to explore how other artists had adapted classical rules to develop their own work. I also developed a love of line drawing and formed a particular bond with the purity of classical, Egyptian art.

My figures are mostly cool and elegant and I enjoy adding details such as bows and buttons, hats and dark glasses, and sometimes tiny dogs, bags and even notebook computers! I set out to create beautiful pieces, often with humorous undertones that hint at a story. The appeal of many of my pieces is that they remind the collector of a spouse, a friend or even themselves.

Although I start a piece with an end result in mind, as I add more clay, the character develops and the figure takes on its own attitudes. I enjoy bringing a piece to life through movement although, conversely, a deliberate absence of movement in some figures highlights a self-containment or an introverted character. This is developed further in the bronze foundry where I experiment with a variety of pigments to achieve patinas that suit the figure.