Samantha Thornton

Samantha came to sculpting late in life, having previously channelled her passion for the medium as a specialist at Sotheby’s in the Old Master Sculpture Department. It was only after she was diagnosed with cancer that she decided she had nothing to lose by trying to do it herself and started taking lessons at a community centre in Hammersmith. Her bronzes are born from wax, built up on a metal armature and then cast with the ancient lost wax technique.  Her stone carvings are painstakingly hewn from the stone by hand with a hammer and chisel and hand polished with sandpaper. These two very different disciplines allow Samantha to work in harmony, one creating the figure by slowly building it up from nothing with wax and the other destroying the rock and coaxing the trapped form to emerge from within: two sides of the same coin. Her interest in the human form originates from her illness and from learning to meditate at that time using her body as her point of focus to bring about healing.