This isn't a lion in his prime. He's an older male, well past the years of youthful strength, and the walk shows it - a slow, languid gait with the weight sitting heavily on tired limbs, the head carried a little low, the whole body moving without much purpose behind it. I was less interested in power than in this: an animal at a more vulnerable stage of his life, still crossing the ground he's always crossed, but slower now, and plainly feeling his age.

The surface is deliberately impressionistic rather than smoothed and finished, left with the marks of the making still in it so that light catches and breaks across the form and travels the length of the animal. Cast in bronze by the lost-wax process in an edition of twelve, with a deep hand-applied patina worked into the modelled surface.