Philip Wakeham is a self-taught contemporary figurative sculptor working exclusively in bronze.

“The human body is the best picture of the human soul.”  Ludwig Wittgenstein

I belive it is the job of the artist to produce symbols of non verbal understanding.

My work is visual art, this is important to understand. It is to be understood through your eyes, and allowed room to connect with the viewer beyond words. It’s fun to talk about things to converse, it is one of the joys of being human, but so much cannot be expressed in words. Words can only describe what you already know, or try to communicate something new through analogy with what you already know, blue can never be comunicated in words .

The visual has a direct path into our minds and hearts, I aspire to create work so beautiful, so arresting, that for if just one moment all thought stops.

Although I did attend art school, none of the skills I use were learnt there, with the exception of the ceramic shell casting process I learnt at the Royal Academy of Art under David Reid, though by then I had already taught myself lost wax casting with pewter in my kitchen. Everything else was from books, endless experimentation and a somewhat reckless willingness to learn through actually doing. My first foundry was in a wooden garden shed behind a cafe in Abingdon town centre.

Before that I learnt to draw, most notably from figure drawing by Anthony Ryder and an obsession with understanding the subtlety of human expression. I used to take photographs of actors, this was in the days of VCR and film cameras, no HD screen captures, just watching a film and trying to press the shutter at the right moment, with only 24 tries before waiting to get the pictures back from Boots to see if I was successful. I considered just one useable picture out of 24 a success. 

Once I had learnt to draw, the sculpting came easy as effectively a sculpture is just multiple drawings of the same subject all condensed into one art work.