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' Troppi ', too much. Too much of a good thing, too much good food, hot weather and fantastic art to look at, this was my experience during my residency in Casole D'Elsa.

This sculpture used this theme and also based itself on the form and pose of the figures on Etruscan ceremonial urn sculptures that stereotypically depict a reclining nobleman holding a dinner plate with food on it to signify a healthy life. My first visits to Florence and Sienna during the residency also opened my eyes to the power, intelligence and humanity of the figurative stone sculpture of the Italian Renaissance, hence my first attempt at a figurative stone piece.

Having said that it was really just a fun piece (taking about seven days to complete), I would really want to study anatomy a lot more extensively and produce a more considered maquette to work from, before I seriously began another stone figure.

This was also the first piece I have done in alabaster which I found very easy to work but this particular stone (from nearby Volterra I think) was a bit crumbly in places, which meant I had to re-carve certain aspects of the pose. I think ' bardiglio ' is a term which means 'veined' or 'webbed' in Italian, rather than it being a region where the stone comes from. The obvious markings of the stone do detract from the underlying form, but the markings themselves are so beautiful I wanted to show this characteristic of the material.