Marcus Cornish
Marcus Cornish is a highly skilled and versatile figurative sculptor, with an output that includes animals, portraits busts and monumental compositions, both secular and sacred. He achieved great success early in his career, and has since been steadily employed in fulfilling significant public and private commissions.
From 1983 to 1986, Marcus Cornish studied sculpture at Camberwell School of Art, gaining a first class honours degree. While still a student, he won the Royal Academy’s British Institution Award for drawing and modelling (1983). Then, soon after he graduated, he became the then youngest ever recipient of the Royal Academy’s Goldhill Award for Sculpture (1987). He has exhibited since 1988.
While studying for an MA at the Royal College of Art, Cornish won two scholarships from the Henry Moore Foundation to pursue ceramic art (1989 and 1991), and a further scholarship to study the work of Ayanar Potter Priests in India (1991).
His master’s thesis concerned the terracotta horses at Ayanar shrines in Tamil Nadu.
Since his election to the Royal Society of British Sculptors in 1993, Cornish has focussed mainly on commissions. These include life-size bronzes of Paddington Bear for Paddington Station (2000), the figure of Courage that surmounts the Victoria Cross Memorial in the Ministry of Defence (2004), and Jesus Christ for the Church of Our Lady Immaculate and St Philip Neri in Uckfield, East Sussex (2009). However, he has continued to exhibit both in solo and group exhibitions.
Cornish spent time as official tour artist on a diplomatic tour of Eastern Europe by the Prince of Wales (2000) and again with The Queen’s Royal Hussars in Kosovo (2002). Between 2002 and 2004, he fulfilled a number of portrait commissions for Prince Charles. He is also an Academic Board member, and occasional tutor, of The Prince’s Drawing School.
Having spent time as Artist in Residence at the Museum of London in 2005, Cornish showed the resulting clay and plaster sculptures at the museum in the solo show, ‘Impressions from a London Seam’ (2006).
Receiving the Talos Award from the Society of Portrait Sculptors in 2012, he was elected a member of the society in 2013.
