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Two Females

Sculptor: Snowden, Michael Alan, RSA · b. 1930

This piece is one of many anonymous female figures positioned in different poses that Michael Snowdon was producing at this time and exhibiting at the RSA. Many of these works were of single figures as opposed to two figures. It is possible that the Diploma Work with its more ethereal, dream like qualities relates to the 1984 series of works "The Dream I" and "The Dream II" that were exhibited at the RSA that year.

Snowden has provided the following information in letter to Collections Assistant of 17/11/2007 "It was first exhibited in the RSA annual exhibition of 1978 and would therefore have been made/ and cast in the previous year. The only other time it was exhibited, before passing into the/ Diploma Collection was in a one man show of sculpture in the ESU Gallery in 1984./ The sculpture came about at a time when I was modelling a number of reclining figures and was/ in this instance, trying to find another figure. possibly male, as a compositional partner. The male/ and female pairing had been a strong theme in a series of small bronzes I had made in the sixties/ where the composition had also included a tree. At that time I was also much taken by the/ compositional forms occurring in Mediaeval Bishops croziers./ After a succession of failures it happended by chance one day that a wax cast, taken from a/ rubber mould of the original figure, was lying alongside the original plaster on my workbench / and it suddenly became apparent that two casts of the same figure would fit together very/ satisfactorily and that the sculpture could then be reared upright to form a circular relief./ The only other sculpture I made from this particular model was also a relief entitled 'Studio Interior' now in the collection of [private collection]'


© Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture




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