Familiar - a series

​

Text from Galerie 24 - Paris Dec 2025

 

Pete Codling is a British artist known for large scale figurative drawing, public sculpture and narrative works that explore memory, mythology and the shared language of human experience. Alongside his monumental charcoal drawings, he maintains a long engagement with sculpture, working with archetypal forms, ancient storytelling and the tactile intimacy and skill of hand made objects. His practice shifts between the monumental and the miniature, inviting viewers to consider how scale influences presence, empathy and meaning. He was awarded the Prix Fondation Taylor for his drawing Kinship, a contemporary Guernica, exhibited at Art Capital in the Grand Palais Éphémère in 2024.

​

The Familiar sculptures are small hand sized figures that merge human and bird forms. They draw on the idea of the familiar spirit, the companion creature found in folklore across many cultures. Rather than illustrating a single myth or belief, these works suggest a universal counterpart to the self, a hybrid presence that feels both ancient and contemporary. Each figure is intentionally ambiguous in species and character, encouraging personal interpretations of vulnerability, protection or quiet resilience. It is intended this series will expand in scale as diptychs matching the animal and human scale, from tiny bird to whale, each with a human head matched to size.

​

Cast in cold cast resin for bronze and produced as limited editions, the tactile sculptures are somewhere between totem and fragment of a narrative. Their compact scale creates a personal, almost devotional encounter. The hybrid, Janus like form reflects both the instinctive, animal side of the human condition and the reflective, humane side of our imagined animal companions. These are spirit animals and spirit humans. Who gets to choose who belongs to who?

​

Individual pieces are available to purchase as artist resin proofs, and serious collectors may also wish to commission a bronze edition. The Familiar series sits within Codling’s wider practice, which examines how stories travel across time, and how even the smallest objects can hold the emotional gravity often associated with his large scale drawings.