BASNewsletter.25-12-e - Flipbook - Page 4
FOUNDED IN 1953
DECEMBER 2025
Adventure, travel & sculpting with Mark Coreth
On 17th October Mark Coreth, the master sculptor of wildlife, treated a packed hall which included
students from Ansford Academy at Castle Cary to a most moving and inspiring lecture and demonstration. He gave us a brief but illuminating and often humorous account of his early life and in昀氀uences
while being brought up in Kenya.
During a fourteen-year career in the army he realised he wanted to devote his life to immortalising
wildlife in bronze.
He demonstrated the rudiments of creating a sculpture beginning with making an armature, the supporting frame, with wire to form the base for whatever animal is to be made, initially in clay or plasticine
in his ‘Backpack Studio’.
He then screened a 昀椀lm made in 2007 on a trip to Ba昀케n Island in the Arctic in search of polar bears
whose very existence is being threatened by the e昀昀ects of global warming and the consequent melting
of the ice cap.
In 2009 he returned to Ba昀케n Island to prepare for his incredible ‘Ice Bear Project’. At this time he
created the bronze skeleton which he and his team encased in a huge block of ice to be carved in front
of the public in Trafalgar Square, ‘A Monument in Ice’. The public was invited to touch the ice bear,
hastening the melting process to illustrate, most poignantly, the plight of the bear and highlight the
fragility of the Arctic ecosystem.
It was a privilege to spend an afternoon in the company of one of the 昀椀nest and most sympathetic living
sculptors of many of the world’s rarest and most amazing wild animals.
Corinna Leigh-Turner
PAGE 4
