Helen Aitchison update - Graduate Diploma in Carving, City & Guilds Art School, London

Thank you and the Knights so very much for this generous award for a second year. I am enormously grateful for your support as it has meant I can continue my studies at City & Guilds, where I have changed course to the Graduate Diploma in Carving part-time over two years. This has been due to financial reasons - I have returned to work in the NHS in order to cover costs.

It has been a successful and rewarding year at City & Guilds. As it was necessary to change course, I graduated with a Diploma in Higher Education (Carving) in June and exhibited the stone capital I was working on when we last met, a ciment fondu transcription of a Joan Eardley pastel drawing and a relief carving of a foliage spray (image attached). We exhibited at 2 Temple Place on the Embankment in August; the image is of my capital resting - upside down! - prior to being carried up to the exhibition space. It has been a great honour to carve the memorial stone for my oldest school friend, Andrea Jones, who very sadly died two years ago. The stone is almost complete (photo attached) and I will take it to her family in Scotland this year.

My great great uncle, Thomas Hadden, ran an architectural wrought iron workshop in Edinburgh during the first half of the last century. Specialising in gates, railings and other ornamental features, they produced work for a number of significant sites including the Scottish National War Memorial at Edinburgh Castle and the Thistle Chapel, St Giles Cathedral. I'm enjoying honouring my family heritage by adapting Hadden work into stone: this is a typical foliage design, probably intended for a gate and the thistle piece is part of a railing in Colinton, Edinburgh.

My major piece for next year will be based on a sheep bone I found on a beach near where I grew up in Galloway, South West Scotland. The intention was to make a full size bench (see the seated clay models on the original bone!) but logistically this will be impossible due to the large scale. As a compromise I'm going to carve a smaller sculpture with a seated figure - the photo shows a scale sketch drawing and a plaster maquette, alongside the bone.