Zak is a sculptor working in marble, based just outside of Frome, Somerset.
He came to carving by an indirect route. Before stone he worked across engineering, steel fabrication, concrete and wood, as well as film, music and graphic design – a restless run of things that never quite settled until 2018, when he met the sculptor Paul Vanstone, who took him on and trained him at his studio in London.
In sculpting, every skill he had developed until then was required, the precision of engineering, the fabricator’s feel for weight and structure, a designer’s eye for line and composition. He has been carving ever since, and continues to work closely with Paul Vanstone from his studio in Witham Friary.
His work is drawn from the figure and the natural world, trying to capture movement in the unmovable, reduced to smooth, flowing forms that reward slow looking and insist on being touched. He is fascinated by the material itself: the way light and shadow behave on polished marble, the veining running through a block, and the moment a hard, heavy piece of stone starts to feel soft.
