Louise Giblin

Louise Giblin (1963-) is a Member of the Royal British Society of Sculptors. She grew up on the Isle of Wight and lives and works on the Kent/East Sussex border, UK. Her work is exhibited and collected internationally.

She represented UK in the International Artist Grand Prize in A.R.T., Taiwan, Asia's largest art fair in 2016 and 2017 and was a Finalist in both years. Also, in 2017 she was chosen as the sole artist to represent UK in the G7 of Art, Italy, and was awarded the Lorenzo Il Magnifico Gold, 1st place for Sculpture by the International Jury at the Florence Biennale XI. In 2018, she is to receive an ATIM International Award for Contemporary Art at the Museum of Art and Design New York.

She studied Art and Design Foundation at Portsmouth, 3 years' 3D Design and BA Honours Sculpture at Brighton, where her tutors were Antony Gormley and Peter Randall-Page, and a further 4 years Master of Arts in History and Theory of Contemporary Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London.

Louise Giblin is predominantly known for life casting - covering Olympians, famous people, war veterans, models and private clients with plaster or alternative media. She produces a clay three-dimensional copy of the person's form that she uses like a blank canvas on which to create the model's narrative imagery. She is not interested in physical portraiture so much as capturing the achievements, positive experiences and passions that people often project to protect their personal selves from scrutiny: she describes this as their 'armour'.

As a child, the artist visited the Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum and considers her fascination for the young king's decorated effigy, alongside a continuing interest in human history, as possibly the source of the desire to create a close facsimile of a human form, to cover it in visual biographical information and complete it in bronze that could survive more than 3000 years and 'talk to the future'.

Louise Giblin also works in other sculptural media and produces smaller or larger than life size figures and heads for interior and exterior display. She exhibits, and is collected internationally, as a draughtsman. Her drawings are usually from observation, comparatively small, complex and overlap like the surface design on her sculptures:

'I do not imagine or remember in a tidy linear form: I tend to think in visual images that overlap. Typical of pre-Renaissance paintings, the larger and more predominant elements of these visual diaries are those things that are often of greater subjective importance, either because of their aesthetic appeal or personal associations.'