Soul of Light was the client's own design as a gift for a friend in Brisbane. She is meant to be an Asian woman wearing a Maori fish hook pendant. Part of the design was a hole through the middle, representing "the light of her soul passing through".

It’s always challenging producing a 3D sculpture from a 2D drawing - particularly from someone else's drawing.

Again I encountered the many challenges of creating a face and a body. She needed to be alluring and feminine of course. Her limbs were mainly covered by hair so at times I had to guess their 3D position and proportion while remaining faithful to the drawing.

I requested particularly hard stone to allow for the finer detail work on the face – hard stone can be a little more difficult to work, and can introduce unwanted variables, i.e. unfossilised wood (brown spots), or compression lines in the stone, which I did encounter. I was so lucky not to get any on the face. The facial features and head size changed many times during her development, the eyes were important and required several attempts, you will see the many changes in the making photos.

 

 

Brett Keno
New Zealand Stone Carving Artist and Sculptor