circa 1978 Unidentified exhibition, The Resistance Series

In these early shows Paul played with a variety of media from concrete mixed with rubber sheets cut into shapes as if moving through a pyramid of mass, to fiberglass, this technology learned in a holiday job in a surfboard factory. A new methodology he settled on for a time was the use of stitched pouches that were then filled with, firstly sand and later plaster, filling out the shapes into soft rounded forms. These first works were dam designs, where a blockade form is represented, holding its own internal pressure. Suspension, 1978 featured a drawing of a bridge shape, a lattice drawn in stitches then with a real cloth hanging centre. In Real Pressure, 1978 there are layers of irony – the stitched drawing of billowing curtains, a central round shape like a balloon in the window’s view and a real plunger that holds on by suction pressure.

This same method, the stitching and filling with plaster, would in another ten years find its way into bronze casting when the plaster shapes, now of figurative studies, were treated in the same way, drawings filled out to become semi-relief forms. The plaster shape with this gentle swell and thin edge would then be painted in wax, some parts carved away, so a pattern created that could be used to cast from.