Selected sculptures using found figurines 2003-2007

Barford spent the early part of his career capturing humorous moments in porcelain. Following the tradition of Hogarth, Chaucer, Dickens and Shakespeare, with a dark sense of English humour and satire, his porcelain figurines are objects with a long tradition of social propriety that explore and celebrate contemporary life, but which have become jarring or inappropriate. 

"Humour is vital to me."

B. Barford

The idea of creating new sculptures by piecing together old, first started while Barford was a student at London’s Royal College of Art. “It just occurred to me how much waste there is in ceramics. If it’s not perfect, it’s just thrown away. So I started to get interested in the idea of recycling.”

His one-of-a-kind whimsical ceramic sculptures provide a clever way of getting people to look again at something they would have on principle have dismissed, in anew a slightly disrupted way.