NO.14 CHRISTOPHER MARVELL: UP OUR STREET - 8 Holland Street's neighbours, near and far

Christopher Marvell's studio is conveniently situated in the back garden of his Cambridgeshire home where he lives with his artist wife, Elaine. His large, bright sculpture studio is littered with plaster moulds of animals and monumental, life-sized figures. 

He has been casting in bronze for thirty years now, a material that certainly has its ups and downs. "The disadvantage of bronze is that it's expensive, long-winded, repetitive and slow but the surface quality is amazing and the material accommodating, you can easily stick things on and remove them." From the beginning, his work has been figurative. Where does the inspiration come from? "None of my sculptures are particularly anybody or anything, it's just a head, just an owl, just a dog. They're emblematic: shapes, forms, emotions..”. 

Across the garden is Christopher's drawing studio, a glass-fronted shed drawn up by his architect daughter. Filling sketchbooks and pinned upon easels, his more recent portraits are sketches rubbed out roughly and redrawn, leaving the ghostly evidence of the previous incarnation partially visible. "I like this method, it retains the stain of the old drawing."

On the external wall of the studio, facing the street, Christopher has mounted John Donne's poem 'The Sun Rising', a nod to the name of the eponymous old pub that once stood here but also, perhaps, a signifier of the light-flooded studio that stands on the other side of the wall.