Alan Franklin

It’s more than 50 years now since I went first to St Martin’s Art College, then to West Surrey College of Art and finally to Goldsmiths University to study sculpture and I’ve been making art ever since. I’ve exhibited widely in the UK and internationally. I now live and work in Sunningwell just south of Oxford and since 1984 I have been very much involved in the Oxford art community, including being a founding member of the Chiltern Sculpture Trail and director of Magdalen Road Studios. For many years I taught Fine Art at North Oxfordshire School of Art, Banbury before joining the Fine Art degree course at Buckinghamshire New University, High Wycombe, where I was Head of Fine Art between 2004 and 2007. I am now retired from teaching, but am currently Chair of Trustees at Sunningwell School of Art.

For some time, my work has played with notions of tangles, random assemblages, and the tension between accident and control. Wabi-Sabi, the
ancient Japanese aesthetic of impermanence and imperfection embraces the beauty of the incomplete, transience and the contingent and is itself a world view. Similarly, my drawings, assemblages and sculptures are soft metaphors for the human condition.

My latest body of work (started in August 2025) is a series of small sculptures entitled ‘That Was Now And This Is Then’. Made from cast plaster
they are born out of thoughts about time, and how the past and present are inseparably entangled. The sculptures loosely allude to architecture, fragments of buildings, monuments and abandoned defences. Their form is the result of the casting process and unforeseeable contingencies; time is made visible through stains, degradation and marks and imprints transferred from the mould.