Rosaline Zipporah: My Practice
Something I often jut up against while writing artist statements, or justifications for my sculptures and sculptural practice, is weaving a conceptual framework between the works. I wrack my brain for the glimmering answer, an unearthed, deeply hidden key to the story. Pathways and link roads between the hard materials, the ritualistic burnings, the curled and folded forms, that I get lost trying to find.
I’ll never know for sure, but I have my suspicions. I grew up by the motorway, so close I could hear the lone twilight drivers from my bedroom. Everything was constantly being built up and torn down around me. East London was undergoing unstoppable regeneration: bulldozing, bricklaying, bridge building. In nursery, they took us on a ‘school trip’ to see the diggers at Canary Wharf, and then again to see the brownfield site of the soon-to-be Olympic stadiums. It would have been impossible for these industrial processes to not lodge themselves somewhere in my mind. The beauty of the cranes on the skyline. The crowded weaves of scaffolding. It must have all remained.
Hooks and crosses, old satellite dishes, spiky aerials, brackets, girders, railings. Shiny things, sparkling from the dirt or the pavement. I’ve always picked the scrap off the floor “tat” my dad would call it. Earrings and pennies, leaning down to examine what only turns out to be confetti from a hen-do. I stop in my tracks watching car-wash signs spin in the wind. It’s all so fantastic to me.
Beginning to work with metal, mostly the cheapest grade steel, filled me with unbelievable satisfaction and I haven’t put it down since. Using my hands, and my body, and whatever little strength I have, to push and pull and operate on raw forms unleashed a carnal feeling of maker-ship. Making the hard soft, the rigid bend. Material as unforgiving as steel fold as if in supplication to me.
Spending so much time with an acetylene torch that I could hear its temperature; the sound of unquantifiable heat. Brazing, just me in all my gear, the torch, and the metals. Bronze on steel. Brass on steel. Mashing them all together. So vividly intimate behind red plastic curtains, and simultaneously terrifying- because I knew if I dropped the torch I’d have killed in the masses. Circling through different smells, my nose was knocked out by the proximity to heat: school dinners, burnt hair, French patisseries. I dare not wonder what that means for my insides.
The sculptures get made, with labour, but with intense love. I never quite know how they’ll turn out… which era I’m unconsciously pulling from. But suddenly there they are. Now, comes the Burnings.
The delicious awkwardness of shared silence, that transforms into something much heavier, lovelier, as the wax begins to drip or the hay begins to char. When I do it well, which is never every time, my nervousness dissolves and I get to see the works in all their glory. The gloriousness of hard, hard work, strife, labour, commitment, and all the snake whispering I did to get the forms to work with me. Burning throws the sculptures momentarily back into the fire they were forged in.
The lineage of the material is expansive and mysterious and not lost on me. I only come to the metal at a late-stage of change. Extracted from the earth as Iron, then the hazy perception of what I imagine a blast-furnace to be like, shaped neatly into the bars and rods and box sections that are shipped out on trucks and delivered right to me. Then we meet, and I push the heat up again, approaching the cherry-red sweet spot, or danger-zone, tweaking, changing, cutting… and quenching. The hiss as the steel touches the bucket is monumental. Finally, to burn the sculptures. Returning them to fire, christening them as mine- my children, my precious objects.
Brass is so yellow, buttercup yellow, and bronze is so pink, rosy gold pink. Taking scrap brazing filament and repurposing it to be decorative as well as functional- not just a joint, but a pattern on top. Concealing the gleam underneath wrapped hay, only for it to be scorched away and quickly rescued. Hours of knotting wet hay and grasses around the steel, with wrinkled clammy hands…letting the artefacts dry in my downstairs living room and under the radiator by my bed. Then trapping them in boxes to soak in paprika, hidden away in the dark wet. Left to dry the second time and set ablaze; smoky savoury smoke bursting forth and into the evening.
All I can think of now are telephone wires, great stretching strings across the landscape. Bobbing lines of three, transmitting voltages of electricity I could never begin to understand. To me they look like tightropes. Appearing innocent although I know they must not be touched.
EXIT signs, the joy of following arrows. STOP signs at the road crossing, the greatness of pressing a button that clicks but does nothing. Creaky seesaws and windsocks fill my head with ideas of building structures up, just to burn them out to nothing. Burn the evidence. Bury it underground. The smell will always remain.
The forms may become unrecognizable, but they stand defiantly even as non-things. Non-things were something once.
Rosaline Zipporah | July 2026