Charlotte Austen

Charlotte Austen is a sculptor based in Castle Cary, Somerset. Born in Singapore and trained in Fine Art Sculpture at Central Saint Martins, she spent fifteen years in large-scale commercial fabrication, making work for theatre, film and window display for clients including Shakespeare’s Globe, Dior and Netflix. That grounding in material, scale and craft now underpins a fine art practice that moves between bronze casting, stone sculpting and églomisé, the historic technique of reverse gilding on glass.

Her work is rooted in the natural world and the folklore of the West Country. Birds, feathers, branches and stone recur throughout, drawing on augury, Celtic and Somerset symbolism, and the idea of the threshold: the moment between one state and another. Each piece explores the meeting of the ephemeral and the permanent, fixing something as fleeting as a bird mid-flight or a fallen feather in enduring bronze and stone.

In works such as Between Passing Wings, birds sweep across life-cast branches, while the In the Theatre of Air series suspends pairs of birds in flight, their long tails trailing like ribbons. Her Pathway Feathers set cast bronze feathers on stone, so that each piece is shaped as much by the landscape as by the studio.