One of the abiding memories of Covid were the overflowing recycling bins, from wine and beer bottles to copious amounts of cardboard packaging.

In the beautiful village of Milburn, near Penrith, it was no different.

Sculptor David Cemmick, who had been working in bronze for many years, saw though the piles of rubbish and realised it was an opportunity. He made a series of creatures from the Amazon using Amazon packaging. His first was an anteater, for which he created the black stripe on the animal’s back from the Amazon tape with the black ticks. “It made sense, an Amazon species using Amazon packaging,” he says.

“I had been thinking for about five years beforehand that I wanted to do something a little less heavy on the environment in terms of footprint. Foundries need a lot of heat, a lot of gas for the bronze, it’s not massively bad but.. it’s also the weight of things. The older I get the less I want to move heavy bronzes and I thought, paper! Initially I just had a car load of flat pack packaging which I took to the recycling bins during the pandemic and the bins were all full so the pandemic gave me time for experimentation.

“I was always thinking commercially because I was trying to work out how to do some big pieces which weren’t heavy and weren’t massively expensive. I’d been looking at 3D printing, looking at different ways I could make life-size, big sculptures I could move around myself.”

His cardboard sculptures are already selling well. He launched them at Manchester Contemporary Art Fair last year where he sold half of the 40 pieces he had on show. “It was about seeing what people thought of them and that I’m heading in the right direction. I was spending a lot of time on this and it’s my living so I need to sell pieces,” he says. He has also exhibited in Edinburgh and the Old Court House in Ambleside also sells his work. “The Old Court House does very well for me,” he says.

Since then he’s created another 40 which are all one-offs. “It’s not like a production of a limited-edition bronze where I may be only doing nine, these are all individual one-off pieces which makes them more special so I like that part of it as well,” he says.

(Image: David Cemmick)

The biggest single piece he has created in his studio in his back garden is a walrus sitting on a director’s chair. An ostrich is also under way and he plans to create an elephant too. “It’s an interesting journey. Every one I do I learn from,” he says. “It’s not anything I have read about, how you work with paper and get it to do what you want it to do is incredibly frustrating as it can be like plaiting sand. You kind of develop techniques. Because I want them to be light the underlying structure is as minimal as I can make it. I’m so interested in what happens when the different layers of cardboard break down, the different textures, colours and all of that. Some of the pieces I do colour and others I like to have the integrity of the natural cardboard, I don’t want to hide it, I want people to know what it’s made of. That’s important to me.”

He uses one of Cumbria’s most ample resources to help the process – rain. “Because it rains such a lot in Cumbria I leave the cardboard outside and it gets wet with the rain and starts to deconstruct so I can peel off the outer layers which gives it rigidity. You can see the varied corrugations, so many different kinds of texture, which is part of the joy of the discovery.”

He's also been looking at Chinese techniques of lacquering and sealants so the sculptures can withstand the Cumbrian weather all year round.

Despite a 50-year career in art he never went to art college. After school he trained as a taxidermist which allowed him to learn about animal and bird anatomy. “I learnt about animal anatomy from the inside out and that I think helped me massively when drawing from life, which has been core to my artistic practice all my working career, I draw all the time. To learn about taxidermy you have to make a sculpture more or less, a mannequin to fit the skin to and if that isn’t anatomically correct it won’t look right. That taught me a lot about building armatures, musculature, anatomy which has helped with all the sculpting I have done. It’s interesting how things feed in - when you look back it makes sense,” he says.

He was 19 when he had his first solo exhibition. “I had 43 paintings and I sold 40, that’s when I decided to try and go freelance and I have been freelance ever since, apart from four years teaching.”  In the early 1980s, he was a senior lecturer at Sunderland University teaching illustration for four years. “The money was good but it wasn’t what I really wanted to do.”

(Image: David Cemmick)

In his painting exhibitions he slowly started to introduce occasional sculptures, then a friend recommended him to a ceramics specialist in the Potteries who needed an animal sculptor. At the interview David remembers: “I sculpted a peregrine falcon head out of a bit of wax on the end of a coat hanger to take with me. Very professional! They showed me around their factory and all of their top pieces, one of which was a big white falcon and I said ‘its feet are wrong, those are the feet of a pheasant’. That got me the job.” His limited edition polar bears, tigers, etc which he made for the company all sold out.

It led him to start creating his own silver and bronze sculptures. “Bronze was like the pinnacle, the one artists know is going to outlive them which is an interesting part of the process,” he says. His bronzes, usually a limited edition of nine, sell for thousands of pounds and he has a range of collectors who buy his work.

Wildlife has been an inspiration for his work since he was a young boy when he used to get up at 5am to observe birds and nature before going to school. During his career he has painted the ethno-medicinal plants of Madagascar for Dr David Bellamy’s Conservation Foundation, illustrated two books focusing on the endangered Kakapo Parrot and Black Robin and studied coral and fish communities on Jamaica’s Morant Cays coral atoll, whilst painting under water. He’s designed Christmas cards for the World Wildlife Fund.

“I’m 70 next year and I’m immensely lucky I have the interest and energy to experiment. I’m really lucky. The thing I’m kind of enjoying is that whoever buys it (one of the cardboard pieces) knows there’s not another piece like it anywhere in the world, totally unique. And I like that! It’s a new client base. People who’ve got those pieces appreciate it is using material which would otherwise be thrown away.”