During this year’s annual ‘Somerset Art Weeks’, at Venue 195 Duddlestone – Mista Fig, a mixed media sculptor, created a gallery in the farm’s original cow-yard, offering ‘The good, the bad and the very ugly’, a retrospective from 35 years of creativity.

To mention a little about his earlier years, aged six, his grandfather offered him wood off-cuts. Mista Fig recalls being captivated, trying to ‘build a new world’. He continued creating from his imagination until, at 14, a teacher introduced him to the History of Art, giving him belief in his future chosen path.

Spending several enlightening years being led along a sculpture trail by Stuart Osbourne (who was guided by the sculptor Jacob Epstein), Fig studied the human figure and nature. A British Council Scholarship to the ‘Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts’, Poland, followed. Believing art chose him, Mista Fig explores ideas using traditional media such as clay, wood and stone, plus manipulating found objects.

Working in series’, for the SAW exhibition, a few sculptures from each were chosen. Enormous heads and life-size figures, from plaster and/or resin, adorned with mirror mosaic, dazzled in the sunlight. Bog Oak (fossilized wood) carved into tall angular figures, stood alongside bouncing fish on springs. Mixed media ‘Little people that have come down from the hills’, created much laughter. Visitors proclaimed it a ’’highly entertaining and thought provoking exhibition’’.

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Soon Mista Fig will continue with ‘The Untouchables’, small bejewelled figures under glass domes, plus, update his website.

Future plans are to experiment with, as yet, un-tried materials and create a permanent artistic environment for his sculpture.

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Andru Fijalkowski’s work is an impressive combination of solidity and delicacy, where emotions, feelings, and ideals are cast in appropriate media. Fijalkowski sees himself as a narrator of fact, a reflector of the individual. In what has become a faceless society he proposes the figure, as the means of expressing the frustrated emotions, faults and mistakes and alien individual feels in the society in which we live – I concentrate on a subject which as a society we have suppressed – the individual.

Mista Fig Website