Robyn Neild’s fashion figures explore her interest in haute couture. She responds to the transformative quality of fashion, describing it as ‘more sculpture than garment,’ as it reconstructs the wearer into an art-object. 

Neild often mimics the natural fibres of runway garments with foraged natural materials. As with her botanical pieces, Neild disrupts the solid expectations of bronze with her fashion figures, making them appear fluidly in motion. Casting these figures herself, she enjoys discovering where the liquid bronze has travelled. Modelled figures, expertly finished, will sometimes emerge from the process with unexpected losses. The artists revels in how these missing parts make her models look barbed and disintegrating. Alexander McQueen said: ‘I want every woman to look beautiful and impossible to touch,’ which is precisely what Neild wants to instil with her sculpture: ‘My women are powerful, they are controlling their own environment.’