At first sight there is very little to connect the pieces in this body of work, but various strands are linked in interests and concerns that have been developing over many years. Sometimes an idea jumps one way, sometimes quite another and in the end a structure, like a spider’s web, emerges. I enjoy drawing from all quarters, from ancient texts, as the Bible and Greek legend, to modern images and objects and relating these in to contemporary concerns. Some of the pieces are quite simple and straightforward or even light hearted, ‘First Fast Food’, ‘Cloud Nine’, the ‘Sadhus’ pieces. The Bulls are just bulls, but this is not to say they have no integrity. Although they owe a lot to my fascination in their body language and movement, I would have no interest in them without their position as deeper symbols of power and masculinity. It’s the same with horses. Our relationship - man, woman and horse is based deep in our psyche, beyond and before words.

I saw the terrible newspaper image of the mother and baby buried in rubble. I think it was in Lebanon, but it could have been anywhere in the world blighted by warfare. I hope it doesn’t diminish their tragedy to link it in with a statistic I read about the First World War; eight million horses killed. I wanted to do something which encapsulated the cruelty, the destruction of modern warfare, the sheer waste of it all. The rockets and mortar shells cast into ‘Collateral’ were collected by weapon decommissioning experts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the sand still on them. There is shrapnel too, cruelly sharp. I had been wanting to do this piece for years, but had to wait until I got hold of a horse skull to draw from. I needed to know every turn and curve intimately before I could begin to sculpt, the whole sad beauty of it.

In Ancient Egypt and later in Greece these strange upright figures or Kouroi – strictly, young men, though ‘Kouros Reedman’ is not – stood outside tombs, always left foot in front of right, arms held stiff and straight to their sides. They may have been guardians, or a portrait of the dead. The reeds came from a local thatcher, the scattered star fossils, segments of crinoids stem washed out of Jurassic rocks by a nearby spring – locally called ‘Holy Well’. The strange leaves came from a Ginkgo tree the most primitive of trees, closer to ferns found in Jurassic times than to other trees.

Like many readers I can’t quite decide what Blake meant in his poem ‘Tyger, Tyger’. The poem has been one I have loved since I first learned it at school, and had been thinking about how to make a sculpture around it, Then by an extraordinary co-incidence I was given a real tiger skull to draw from, hence ‘Tyger’.

In 2007 I was commissioned by a private collector to make a 1.6m high ciment fondu piece I called ‘The World Gone Pear-Shaped’. The idea for ‘A History of the World in Four Fruits’ flowed from our present hopes and anxieties about the future of life on earth. Artists have long used fruit as a metaphor for both the abundance and transience of life; the pear’s irregular shape and in particular its knobbly skin suited my purpose. In this tiny version, now a quartet and cast from real fruit, I have revisited the idea, giving the earlier piece a kind of ‘back story’.

‘Modern Pentathlon’ was commissioned by Art at the Edge and is one of 50 sculptures made especially for the 2012 Olympics. Pentathlon involves five sports originally derived from skills to make a perfectly balanced athlete: fencing, swimming, shooting, running and riding. The circle recalls Leonardo’s famous encircled Ideal Man, the pentathlon fitting precisely into it. The wild horse flying over his shoulder refers to the fact that in Modern Pentathlon, participants must ride a randomly allotted horse they have never ridden before, around a timed course of jumps.

On the steep hillsides of the Marlborough downs near where I live, the slopes are furrowed with animal tracks and giant horses are carved into the chalk, where they can be seen from many miles away. On top of the hills are Bronze Age forts. Although re-carved in modern times the horses were originally part of pre-historic worship of horses and of the goddess Epona. A folk memory of this may explain why the British – alone in Europe - have a taboo against eating horse flesh. I found the fossilised horse tooth the, ‘Fossil Horse’ stands on, in the brook in our garden. It seemed just right to make the fossil bronze, curved and ridged like the chalk hills, and to make a silver horse to belong to it.

Deborah van der Beek, October 2011