Tom Waugh, stone sculptor, the long life of disposable things

That instinct was given a formal foundation at the City and Guilds of London Art School, where, in 2004, Waugh studied architectural stone carving with the support of the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust. He came out the following year with a First and went on to work on major historic buildings including St Paul’s Cathedral, Windsor Castle, St Pancras Station and St Martin-in-the-Fields.

Architectural carving is a discipline of self-effacement. The carver matches a weathered original so closely that the repair is meant to disappear into the building. Waugh gave years to that tradition before returning to Somerset in 2008 to work freelance. One restoration he worked on, the Bath stone bridge at Halswell Park, received a Georgian Group award in 2021.

A travel bursary in 2006 sent him a long way from English church fabric. The Ballardie award supported a period in India studying temple carving with Raja Saceran, and what struck Waugh there was the continuity of the tradition. Skills had been passed directly from one generation to the next, rather than being reconstructed from historical evidence.

Along with his carving diploma, those techniques became the foundation of his work. Even now, with contemporary subjects, the tools and the methods come from history. Sometimes the connection is surprisingly direct. Crumpled cardboard can echo the folds of Baroque drapery. Joining differently coloured marbles, as in Traffic Cone, comes directly from classical portrait carving.

The first of the objects arrived almost as an experiment. In the quiet moments between commissions, he took a piece of Portland stone and carved a crumpled cardboard box, wondering how realistic he could make something so ordinary.

He loved the tension immediately: a fragile, temporary object carved in a material associated with permanence and reverence. From there he began exploring other everyday things, looking for stones that could bring their textures to life.

The humble subject and the noble material remain in constant friction. A disposable object is given the time, care and permanence of a sculpture. The result can be funny, strange or unexpectedly affecting.

Everything depends on the stone, and the choice begins with the object. White marble for plastic and polystyrene, ironstone for rusted metal, limestone for paper: some pairings are obvious. “The challenge, and the fun, is finding a stone that doesn’t just imitate the object, but reveals something about it.”

That search has become part of the practice. Waugh is always looking for new objects and new stones. Great Tew ironstone comes out of the ground rust-coloured and gritty, so that a can carved from it seems to have corroded rather than been cut. Statuario, cool and grey-veined, gives a polythene bag the hang of drapery.

For Traffic Cone, three marbles are joined within a single body, in the way portrait busts were once assembled from coloured stone. The old language of sculpture remains present even when the subject has been pulled from the street, the supermarket or the recycling bin.

Some of the work gives up the pretence of being an object at all and turns into geology. In the Anthropocene Fossils series, everyday manufactured forms are imagined as the fossils that might remain from our era.

It is easy to forget how many objects pass through our hands every day. In the past, man-made things were precious and built to last. Now so much of what we produce is temporary and disposable. These imagined fossils ask what traces those objects might leave behind.

The point is not delivered as a lecture. Waugh is explicit that he never wants the work to preach. Humour provides the counterpoint. A viewer can enjoy the craftsmanship and playfulness, or follow the thread into the deeper questions about how we treat the natural world and the things that pass through our hands. Both responses are valid.

The studio runs on office hours. Waugh treats carving as a nine to five job, most days amounting to eight hours of steady work. There is something meditative about the concentration it requires, he says, and he cannot imagine doing anything else now.

His favourite moment comes around two-thirds of the way through a piece, when the form is fully realised and the detail begins to emerge. For a moment, the sculpture seems to come alive. Then comes the long stretch of sanding and polishing.

And finally there is the reaction he is looking for: the instant when the eye corrects itself. Take the puffer jackets. Waugh loves it when people initially think they are looking at an ordinary jacket hanging from a hook, then realise that the whole thing is marble.

He hopes they appreciate the carving and the detail, but he also enjoys the questions the work raises. The object may have been designed to disappear; the stone insists otherwise.

“People often assume I use 3D scanning or CNC machines, and I take that as a compliment. It opens up a conversation about fine art and craft, and how inseparable they really are in my work.”