Nessie
"You Only Own Your Beliefs"
Genesis
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I was invited by Martian Toys to create a piece for Nessie Is More, a group show presented at ToyCon UK in London. The theme was the Loch Ness monster, and I wanted to use that prompt as an excuse to push myself technically and scale-wise.
The Surgeon's Photograph, 1934
Concept
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Instead of treating Nessie just as a creature design exercise, I wanted to approach it from a more conceptual angle. Nessie exists in the collective imagination even if it doesn’t exist physically. That idea (that something can be “real” because people believe in it) felt like a good starting point.
It also linked to something more personal: many of the things we believe, even the ones that don’t belong to the physical world, affect how we move, how we see ourselves and how we stay afloat. That’s where the title “You Only Own Your Beliefs” came from.
I modeled a small sailor resting on a donut-shaped float tied to Nessie’s neck. That detail acted as an anchor for the message: we’re held up by the beliefs that support us, even if they look irrational from the outside.
Process
I decided to build a large-format piece, using the classic silhouette of Nessie emerging from water with the long neck, the head, and a couple of segments of the body breaking the surface. I translated all of that into clean shapes, stylised proportions and the signature facial structure of my own language.
To emphasise scale, I added three small seagulls perched on the upper part of the neck. They helped frame the creature as something monumental without turning the piece into a literal scene.
The whole sculpture was fully handmade in polymer clay, and the size made the technical part demanding, but in a good way. The physical effort matched the conceptual intent.
Outcome
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I took the piece to London for the show. It was very well received and appreciated for its craftsmanship and scale. At the same time, I realised that the event had a more collector-market atmosphere than I expected (space, lighting, crowd). The way I conceive my artworks leans more toward the art-gallery side of the spectrum, so the contrast made the piece feel slightly out of place despite the good response.
It wasn’t sold at the time (mostly due to the price of a fully handmade, large-format piece and the context of the event) but it remains an important piece within my body of work. It represents a moment when I pushed both the scale and the conceptual layer of what I was doing, and it’s still the biggest I’ve ever made in full polymer clay.
