© Roger Edwards, courtesy Worthing Museum
Roger Edwards got a leaving present with a difference when the anaesthetist left his post at Worthing and Southlands Hospitals.
“My close colleagues presented me with a set of sculpting tools and a weekend course in stone sculpture at West Dean,” he says, describing a gift which must be the envy of anyone on the receiving end of a box of chocolates and a cheap card.
Edwards had a boyhood passion for bugs and creepy crawlies, played out in his cheeky carvings of huge crabs, spiders, woodlife and crawling creatures.
The insects are made from stone and marble, with the more complicated parts – arachnid legs, clipped pinchers – fashioned with surgical techniques perfected during his medical career.
“I am still surprised by what emerges from a block of stone – the process seems to take me by the scruff of the neck and the stone tells me what to do,” he reflects ahead of the first public display of his work.
“I am amused and intrigued that people with an instinctive aversion to spiders, parasites and grubs are compelled to caress my stone sculptures.”
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