When I began the Drift series, I kept returning to Omo Girl.
I remember sculpting her with her chest lifted and the long line of her dress pulling the form downward, as if gravity itself were a thread I could tighten or loosen.
The series isn’t a single object but a way of seeing that moves between clay, digital, and back again—like wind crossing snow, then circling to re-shape what it just made. I start small. I make tiny sculptures—quick, intuitive maquettes where fingerprints matter more than polish. At that scale, I can try ten ideas before the coffee cools. A rib becomes a dune. A shoulder becomes a cornice. A negative space opens like a valley.
Then I scan those maquettes. This is not a translation so much as a continuation. Sculpting and modelling are just two dialects of the same language. In digital space I can rotate, stretch, and test structure—pushing a curve until it almost fails, then pulling it back to where it can breathe. I’ll isolate a ridge, echo it elsewhere, verify balance and wall thickness, and experiment with relationships between mass and void. The screen lets me preview what a storm might do to a line before I commit it to bronze.
From there, I print. The object returns to my hands. I sand, refine, I add clay, I score new currents into a surface to catch light differently. Then I leave it and observe. Each pass keeps the spontaneity alive—the original quickness from those first maquettes—while giving me the precision to honor it at scale. I can do this process dozens of times before I actually feel she is close..
That back-and-forth is the heartbeat of Drift. The work is about inflection points—those human moments where something is about to change—and my process mirrors that: always arriving, always about to become.
In the end, each piece in the Drift series is the record of a conversation—with material, with weather, with memory. And when it’s finally cast, the sculpture holds that exchange inside it.
James Stewart Sculpture
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