"When I was a student at the Slade my daily walk to the school took me through several Bloomsbury city squares planted with magnificent mature London Planes.
I was impressed by the way the diverse volumes of the many branches of each tree were perfectly but asymmetrically balanced in space, around the trunk, as though the tree might remain upright without its roots.
The structural principle seemed to be that the sections of individual branches reduced in size in strict relation to their distance from the trunk, collectively, and magically, maintaining the equilibrium of the whole.
I used the idea in a hand sized plaster sculpture which I submitted to the annual Slade Summer Composition show. It attracted little interest at the time, but for me it remains one of my most important sculptures, informing much of my work over the succeeding sixty five years."
Paul de Monchaux, April 2022