Andrew is currently developing A thousand cuts, a large-scale installation of carved stone shark fins.

“I began this project as a response to the practice of shark finning and the extraordinary cruelty of removing a shark’s fins, often before discarding it back into the sea, alive but unable to swim. It was first and foremost an environmental work about the consequences of human actions and the way we treat the natural world.

As the project developed, I began to understand that the fins had also become a metaphor for my own experience of growing up deaf. Looking back through earlier sculptures, I realised this had been a recurring theme throughout my work from the beginning: living beings constrained, injured or prevented from fulfilling their natural potential. Constrained not because of who they are, but because of the way society, or the world around them, can work against them.

A thousand cuts retains its original environmental message, which remains fundamental to the work, but has also become an exploration of deafness, disability and difference. The installation asks viewers to consider both the harm we inflict on the natural world and the quieter, cumulative ways people can be diminished through exclusion, prejudice or low expectations.

Realism is important to my practice, so I have been experimenting with different types of stone and researching the anatomy of shark fins. Slate has proved to be the most suitable material, not only because it closely resembles the colour and texture of a shark’s skin, but because it formed beneath ancient oceans at around the same time sharks first evolved, over 450 million years ago.”