I sculpted this African elephant after a research trip to Kenya, where I spent time watching them at close quarters, and the thing that stays with you is not really the size - though they are vast - but how quietly and deliberately something that large moves across the ground.

The finished piece is cast in bronze by the lost-wax process and given a soft green verdigris patina, applied by hand and kept deliberately subtle, so that the colour settles into the folds and hollows of the skin and lifts gently across the raised forms as the light moves around it. It is a quiet, weathered green rather than a bright one, and it suits the animal - there is a sense of age and permanence in it that sits well with the elephant's own gravity.