Saint Michael

A sculpt of Saint Michael inspired by medieval reliquary busts and polychrome sculpture.

This sculpt was made in response to the brief ‘Future of the Past’, which was set as a project in my second year of university. The aim of the brief was to make a model that communicated what people in the past thought the future would be like.

I chose to make a sculpture depicting what medieval society predicted the future would be like, informed by reading into the subject as well as visits to the V&A and Mappa Mundi of Hereford Cathedral. I felt it would be interesting to show what a much older civilisation thought the future would be like, as opposed to the often seen ‘retrofuturistic’ 20th century vision of the future.

Medieval society was predominated by Christianity and thus its interpretation of the future was primarily a theological one, based on the ‘Book of Revelation’ aka the Last Judgement. In the Last Judgement, the souls of the dead are roused from their graves and consigned either to Heaven or Hell.

To represent this I sculpted Saint Michael, who appears in scenes of the Last Judgement with weighing scales to judge the souls of the dead. The sculpt was made with Super Sculpey, gilded with impression gold leaf and painted with acrylics, to recreate the look of medieval polychrome sculpture.