There are three notable higher education courses in craft design: at Manchester, Brighton and Hereford.  Emily chose Hereford, conscious of the need for business management skills which they offered, and drawn by their links with the blacksmithing courses at nearby Holme Lacey, and the high reputation of the course for producing self-supporting artists capable of making a living from their work. 

Sadly, the course was created from an engineering background.  Students were required to research, sketch and photograph, and then to visualise their final product, which would be drafted and fully designed on paper before construction of the final piece.  Emily was happy to research, and still spends considerable time watching, photographing, drawing and getting to know her subjects; but then she finds the best way to visualise is to begin work with the copper, shaping, heating and beating, and the sculpture itself changes and develops during this process.  Copper is a remarkable medium: amongst the most malleable and ductile of metals, it has both strength and softness, it has colour and texture; it can be harsh and jagged, or soft and strokeable;  springy and vibrant or dark and massive.  The course and the artist could not be reconciled, and towards the end of her second year, after a continuing series of depressing grades and destructive criticism, she left.  It was a dark time, and she felt angry and more than a little lost.

However, her work was already selling.  Early trial pieces, mainly mice and dragonflies, were selling from a gallery in Hereford, and on the day she finally walked out of the college, she was offered a partnership in an artists’ cooperative running a small gallery in Hay-on-Wye, on the strength of these pieces.  Her five-foot tall elephant, produced as part of the Hereford course but to a brief set and marked by a visiting artist – and the only piece of her work at Hereford to earn a good grade – received praising comments and offers.  Led on by the hope that there might still be something she had to offer, and by these slender threads of encouragement, she returned to live at her parents’ house, and opened a gallery and workshop in a converted potting shed at a developing plant centre at Worth, near Sandwich.

This was a time of small triumphs.  The first direct sales of small pieces; the first day on which she sold separate items to two different customers; every positive comment in her visitors’ book.  She researched and created the beginnings of the range of sculptures for which many now know her, many of which can be seen in the gallery pages of this site.  There was a starfish, and mice; butterflies and dragonflies sold well.  She experimented with some larger pieces – a zebra amongst them, with just the black stripes actually formed in copper – and chickens, which were immediately popular.  The mare and foal, full size, which are amongst her most striking works, date from this time.

As well as animals, she began to create flowers and plants, whose delicate shapes, colour and structure, converted well into the medium.  Her work is not a copper replica of the reality; it is a representation of the essence of the animal, plant, or structure.  A commission for a Spitfire showed that the principle applies equally well to machines that have souls: it is at the same time a rugged metal structure, yet also the decayed ghost of the dream which won the Battle of Britain.  After a holiday in Tenerife, where she spent time photographing and drawing a crocodile in a wildlife park, she created a twelve-foot armoured monster, edged with jagged triangular plates and menacing teeth; but the same material can become the iridescent veined wings of a dragonfly, or the textured coat of a retriever, or the suckered curling legs of an octopus.  Her owl is a blend of barely-existent spread wings, a spectacled face of eyes and curved beak, and below, the vice-like grip of the clawed feet, one clutching a mouse as it pauses on a fence post.

Gradually, as her work became known in the immediate area and then farther afield, commissions began to come in.  The first owl is now resident in France, and a wild boar has gone to Sweden.  There are stags and hinds in Loughborough and Canterbury, a small crocodile in Sandwich (yes, she made it snappy) and another in Florida.  There is a nine-foot bear, grasping at a salmon, who has ambled off the drawing-board and into life.  Her work can be bought in Cliftonville, Sandwich, Leatherhead, Hereford, Coventry and Prague, as well as at events and exhibitions throughout Kent.

By 2004, sales were strong enough to allow her to move out from her parents’ house, as well as buying a van and a horsebox to move larger pieces.  She has moved twice to new and better workshops. 

In 2006 Emily married, though she retained the name Emily Stone for her sculpture.  Tragically, in 2010 her husband was diagnosed with an aggressive form of motor neurone disease, and he died in January 2011.

Relatively few people are able to support themselves entirely through art, but since leaving school Emily has had no other income, and is determined to make her way in the world through the interpretation and creation of natural forms in this most remarkable of media. She is a prolific artist.  Some of the many pieces she has created can be seen in the Gallery on this website.  If you own an early mouse, guard it well!  For the future, who can say what will appear next?  You may wish revisit this website and follow the unfolding story – have you bookmarked us?

To receive occasional emails concerning exhibitions or significant new works, please email emily@coppercreatures.co.uk .  I do not spam, and I won’t pass on your address to anyone else so you won’t get inundated with junkmail.

Copyright on all images and designs on this website remains with Emily Stone