These paintings were on offshoot from my earlier series ‘Face Values’, which concerned itself with originality and repetition via replication of portrait images. These paintings continued that direction but were all derived from sculptures (casts or fakes in fact) in the V&A museum. In some I emphasised the casting marks on them others the damage to the surface, in all I was trying to, Pygmalian like, bring the statues to life. I was taken at the time with the flat black background in certain Flemish paintings and wanting to provide a similar neutral, slightly ambiguous space.