Cartoon Bust — Retired Headmistress, Cut-Paper Treatment, Dublin

She taught at the same school for twenty-six years and ran it for eleven of them. The staff wanted a sculpture, the governors wanted nothing that would frighten the parents, and the art department had one suggestion which turned out to be right: make it out of paper.

The idea that survived

Not actual paper, obviously. The piece is fibreglass. But it is built as though each element of her had been cut from a sheet and stacked: a cream silhouette, then a dusty pink layer for the blouse, then mustard for the cardigan, then teal for the glasses and the brooch. Each layer sits about 12 mm proud of the one behind it, so the whole bust has a soft cast edge everywhere a layer ends.

Teachers work in layers. Lesson plans, marking, duty rotas, parents’ evenings, and underneath all of it a person who has been standing at the front of a room for twenty-six years. That is the piece.

Keeping it a person

Flat layers are a risk on a portrait, because a face made of flat planes stops being a face very quickly. We protected the likeness in three places and left everything else flat: the eyes are modelled in the round, the mouth is a single curved cut, and the line of the chin is the one soft edge on the whole sculpture.

Her glasses are two teal circles cut clean, with a small bridge. That was her request and it is the element that makes the piece unmistakable from across the garden.

Build

Fibreglass over a steel core, matte finish on the flat faces and a low satin on the cut edges, which reproduces the way real cut card catches light only along its edge. Five colours, and no blending anywhere.

In the school garden

It stands at the edge of the garden where she used to take her coffee, at a height of about 1.6 m so that it is level with a standing adult and above the children, which the art department insisted on. Children touch the cast edges constantly. That is holding up well, because those edges are laminate, not paint.