Sculpting the Unseen
Nature, Mythology and the Life Within Metal
There is an extraordinary sense of movement in Georgie Seccull’s sculptures. Birds, animals and mythical creatures appear to twist, unfurl and emerge from the metal itself, their forms seemingly caught between stillness and motion. Working with stainless steel, the Australian sculptor transforms a hard, industrial material into something remarkably delicate, fluid and alive.
Largely self-taught, Seccull began her creative career in advertising and copywriting before moving into installation art and sculpture. Her early experiments with salvaged materials, found objects and unconventional techniques laid the foundations for a practice built around curiosity, intuition and an enduring fascination with the natural world. Today, her sculptures are constructed from hundreds of individually cut pieces of metal, which she gradually brings together in a process she likens to assembling a jigsaw puzzle.
Drawing on Mythology, the rhythms of nature and the relationship between opposing forces, Seccull explores ideas of creation and destruction, strength and fragility, chaos and order. Her work has been exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria and can be found in public spaces and private collections across Australia. She has also received recognition through the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize.
For Seccull, sculpture is as much about discovery as it is about the finished form. Each piece begins with fragments and gradually takes shape through an intuitive dialogue with the material, revealing something that even the artist could not have entirely anticipated.
In this interview with The FLUX Review, Seccull reflects on her unconventional journey into sculpture, the childhood experiences that continue to shape her practice, and the almost magical process through which scattered pieces of steel become living, expressive forms.
You began your career in advertising and copywriting before moving into installation and sculpture. What was the point when making things stopped feeling like a side interest and became the direction you wanted to pursue seriously?
I think the moment I decided to pursue art seriously was when I realised I wanted to use my creativity to express something that felt sincere to me, rather than selling a product for a client.
Once I’d made that decision, there was no looking back. I threw myself headfirst into every opportunity that came my way, fervently exploring my own ideas and mythology with an almost childlike sense of wonder.
Through that exploration, I discovered a deeper connection to the world around me, and it all naturally unfolded from there.
You have spoken about always being a collector, even as a child spending weekends on your grandmother’s farm gathering twigs, feathers and other objects. Do you think that instinct to collect and examine things is still at the heart of the way you work now?
Yes, absolutely. There’s something that comes alive in me when I see fragments, each with their own story, and then bring them together to create something I could never have imagined on my own. I’m constantly inspired by the way things come together, almost like a jigsaw puzzle.
It’s always been the way I create, and my studio practice reflects that. My floor is a sea of metal, made up of thousands of individual hand-cut shapes from which I intuitively pick up pieces, one by one, discovering how they connect and weave together to gradually form a sculpture. With each new work, more pieces are added to the floor, and some may lie there for years before finding their way into a sculpture.
I’m still constantly in awe of this process, and I think it comes from the very same instinct I had as a child collecting things on my grandmother’s farm.
You are largely self-taught and have described learning through making, experimenting and sometimes getting things wrong. Has that given you a different kind of confidence than more formal sculptural training might have?
I’ve always felt such freedom in being self-taught, particularly in those early years. There was this raw thrill of creating whatever I wanted out of whatever I could find. I would spend hours climbing through scrap metal yards, collecting old computer and car parts, feeling so alive with the possibilities of what they could become.
For the first ten years, much of my work was made entirely from salvaged materials. It was through working with scraps and offcuts that I began developing the process I still use today, where I essentially create my own offcuts from sheets of metal and then intuitively bring them back together to form a sculpture.
I began knowing very little, buying a new tool with the money I earned from each project and often using it in ways it probably wasn’t intended for. I experimented with everything from furniture and clothing design to street art, installations and land art. I loved playing with people’s perceptions of materials, creating enormous paper sculptures that felt heavy and monumental, or heavy sculptures that appeared light and ethereal.
I hadn’t studied art at school, so those first ten years were really about exploring without boundaries. Each project naturally led to another, often through a new material or an unexpected opportunity.
It was then that one of those opportunities led me to welding and stainless steel, and from there everything changed. I felt as though I’d met my muse in metal, and so it became my primary sculptural material.
Stainless steel is such a hard, industrial material, yet your sculptures often feel fluid, delicate and almost weightless. What first made you realise you could make steel behave in that way?
I think it came from those early years of constantly pushing boundaries and experimenting without any formal training or preconceived ideas about how things should be done. I’ve always loved playing with the paradox of materials, taking something heavy and industrial and making it feel light and fluid, or transforming something as delicate as paper into something that feels monumental. There was a real freedom in not knowing the rules and simply exploring what was possible.
Your process begins with hundreds of individual pieces scattered across the floor before you gradually build the sculpture, almost like a jigsaw puzzle. Do you enjoy not knowing exactly what the final form will become when you start?
Yes, I love the feeling of being in a relationship with something bigger than myself, an unseen creative force that wants to come through. There’s such joy and magic in picking up these scattered pieces and weaving them together, allowing them to reveal and direct the flow of the piece. They begin to create these swells of energy and movement that mirror the subtle sensations I feel in my body and in the world, but that we don’t necessarily see.
When the final form is revealed, I’m always in awe, as I see my inner world reflected back to me in the piece.
I can never quite explain how those experiences become woven into the work, but that mystery is part of what makes the process so magical to me.
Animals and natural forms recur throughout your work, from birds and insects to more mythical creatures. What is it about the natural world that gives you such a rich language for exploring wider ideas?
I’ve always been deeply drawn to mythic stories and how they live in our bodies, our communities and the natural world. My own creative process echoes the creation stories told across many cultures, where we begin as one, are separated into countless fragments, and are drawn back together through a longing to reunite.
Every time I create a sculpture, I feel myself retracing that story. I begin with a single sheet of metal, cutting it into hundreds of individual organic shapes, scattering them across the floor and then intuitively weaving them back together into a new being. There’s something about that cycle of separation and reunion that feels deeply connected to the stories we’ve been telling about creation and existence since the beginning of time.
Many of your works seem to sit between opposing forces: strength and fragility, chaos and order, life and death. Are those contrasts something you consciously begin with, or do they emerge through the making?
I’ve always loved the relationship and interplay between opposing forces and how everything in this world moves in waves. Breath, blood, tides, seasons – life is always unfolding through these continual cycles of expansion and contraction, birth and decay, strength and fragility. Rather than opposing one another, I see these movements as belonging to the same living pulse.
It’s something I consciously begin with, as the overall composition of a piece will always strive to hold both sides of this dynamic. But it’s also something that emerges intuitively through the making, in the smaller gestures within the form – the curve of a muscle, the swirl of a tail, the way individual pieces weave together to create their own rhythms of movement. It’s a dance that unfolds at every scale of the sculpture.
It’s what inspires every creation. This longing to give form to that pulse, to see it alive in motion, to feel as though the sculpture is simultaneously unfurling and gathering inward, moving with the unseen rhythms that live beneath the surface of all things.
