Spotlight on sculptor, Frippy Jameson

Keep Creativity Going

Taylor Howes came across sculptor Frippy Jameson’s work when she was nominated as an artist as part of our Keep Creativity Going campaign. Frippy, a sculptor of both equine and figurative pieces, details below her career, her sources of inspiration and some of the interesting projects she is currently working on.

Horses are wonderful teachers of silence. If you’ve ever lingered at a field gate as the sunlight fades, there is a precious stillness as the animal kingdom is left in the presence of nature. It’s this atmosphere of stillness and calm, fragility and strength that sculptor, Frippy Jameson captures in her equine and figurative pieces.

A lifetime passion for horses started during childhood with an early appreciation for their freedom, beauty and innate sense of calm. After studying Fine Art Sculpture at Camberwell College of Art and Design and furthering her training at City and Guilds London Art College, Frippy’s early career focused on portraiture commissions. It was a family move to the Scottish Borders in 2014 that enabled Frippy to realise her long held dreams of expressing her own style and creating life size sculptures of horses.

Working from life as much as possible, Frippy takes her inspiration from local racehorses, polo ponies and hunting horses, depending on the piece or collection. The creative process always starts with a small maquette, working from life observation to determine the intricacies of each horse and then scaling up to the correct size, working in Plasteline – a waxy, oil-based clay – before finally casting in bronze.

Patination is an art itself and quite individual to every sculptor, similar to the brush strokes that may be recognised in a painter’s work. Learning to patinate her own bronzes and particular Verdigris, Frippy authors a signature artistic ‘lightness’ and realism in her work. Experimentation with colour, ageing and specialist gold leaf and powder coatings are also used to emphasis specific atmospheres of strength or silence across different pieces.

From portraits of individual horses, life-size majestic animals in situ to ‘Boy & Horse’ that showed at Messums in Wiltshire, Frippy’s sculpture has not surprisingly inspired some impressive private commissions. In this last year alone, she has been working on several dream commissions, each with their own unique story. As well as a single bronze horse, that was commissioned as the centrepiece to a wooded contemplation garden, a life size horse portrait, worked up from a client’s own retired racehorse, is due to be installed in the garden of their summer home, in Portugal.

When asked what creative expression means to her, Frippy replied, “It’s striving to portray the relationship between fragility and strength; whether it’s the captivating presence of a single, life size sculpture or the act of stillness that is felt when a figure and horse are placed together”.

More of Frippy Jameson’s work can be seen here

This article was guest written by Jo James, Co-Founder of One Menagerie.