Stephanie Fuller Gallery

The Footballer

The Footballer, 2005
Bronze, unique
approx. 42 cm high

The Footballer is concerned with the moment immediately before action. The figure leans forward, his weight and posture suggesting that he is about to move, to run or to kick the ball, while the sculpture itself remains still.

The tension lies in that contradiction: movement is anticipated rather than depicted.

This idea developed partly through my conversations with the art critic Peter Fuller, when I was an art student. We would look together at the copy of Michelangelo’s Moses in the Victoria and Albert Museum, where Fuller discussed ideas he had explored in Art and Psychoanalysis. Looking closely at Moses, I became fascinated by the sense that the seated figure is on the verge of standing. The sculpture contains the possibility of the next movement.

In The Footballer, I deliberately worked with that same idea of potential movement. The forward lean is not simply a description of a footballer’s pose: it creates the feeling that the action has already begun in the viewer’s imagination.