_Hamish Mackie: the sculptor and his passion for wildlife

Should you ever want confirmation that we are a self-obsessed species you need only look at our art: the subject that overwhelms the history of painting and sculpture is man. We claim to revere animals, but have nevertheless rarely immortalised them in art beyond the horses great men have ridden and the hounds and livestock they have owned. Hamish Mackie's sculptures reverse that age-old order – they are all about the animals, not the people. 

Mackie's spiritual ancestors are the animalier artists of the 19th century, such as Antoine-Louis Barye, and distinctive painters such as George Stubbs and Sir Edwin Landseer who made the natural world their own, or David Shepherd, who continues to do so. It is a tradition Mackie has not just revived, but expanded. 

His career started with companion creatures – portraits of pet dogs and horses – but he soon reached the point at which the prospect of modelling another genial Labrador 'would make me scream' and he turned to the wider and wilder animal world that had always fascinated him. 

The only way to truly understand the animals he wanted to sculpt, he decided, was to study them in their proper habitats. So, like a naturalist, he went to Australia for kangaroos, Belgium on the trail of wild boar, Russia for Arctic terns, the Emirates for camels, and Africa over and over again, for buffalo, cheetah, elephants, rhino and buck.

What unites all his work is that his animals are in movement. Usually that fluidity is real – a leopard climbing a tree or a horse jumping are all ripples and tensed muscle – but even when he sculpts animals in repose, he hints at the flickering eyelid and the pulse beneath the skin. Body language, he says, is a way of showing a creature's character. 

'I have an advantage over earlier artists,' Mackie says, 'in that I can bring back photographs, video and measurements to my studio.' While true, he still needs to turn his research material into art. He works by modelling first in clay, using an expressive technique of layering, gouging and impressing, saying its 'physicality gives surface energy'.

He is not interested in a smooth finish but in one that suggests the hardiness of the animals themselves. The models are then cast in bronze, some tiny – a winsome dung beetle, for example, or an owl that fits on a finger ring – and others life-size, such as a group of unnervingly lifelike Roe deer. 

As they should, Mackie's animals roam: some look comfortable in domestic interiors while others, a pair of hares boxing or an otter twisting its head at a noise, work best outside. For good measure, 'I have a camel in my shed at the moment,' he confesses. 

One of the best places to gauge the impact of Mackie's large-scale works is at the new Berkeley Group residential development at Goodman's Fields at the edge of the City of London.

The site was once a livery surrounded by open fields, a farming area worked by horses and criss-crossed by innumerable carts bringing produce into the city, so it was only appropriate that Mackie took horses as his theme. What he created though had nothing to do with placid agricultural animals; rather, he summoned up a series of six life-and-a-quarter scale Andalusian stallions that gallop and surge through the piazza.

They rise and crest like a breaking wave, careening through a specially commissioned water feature as though through a river, and bring an extraordinary dynamism to the public space. 

Simply as a technical feat the animals are formidable, with nothing of this size previously attempted in contemporary sculpture. The largest animal measures 3.6 metres high and weighs 1.7 tonnes. T

o make all six, Mackie used 1.5 kilometres of steel armature to support the staggering 6.5 tonnes of clay used for the full-size models. Mackie has worked with the Lockbund Foundry in Oxfordshire for 20 years and its craftsmen are so skilled they can cast half-tonne pieces in one go, yet maintain his fingerprints left in the modelling clay.

The horses required all this experience when casting six tonnes of bronze while still transmitting the vigour and delicacy of Mackie's models. 

There is something counter-intuitive about seeing Mackie's wild horses in such a regulated urban setting, but in reality they appear complementary rather than incongruous – or no more incongruous than a dream – and their sinuous lines offset the straight lines of the buildings around them. As all of Mackie's sculptures show, nature has no boundaries and his work too can live just as happily in town as in the countryside. 

As we appreciate the animal world more and more, perhaps we'll come to appreciate animal sculptors as big beasts in the art world too. Mackie though won't predict the future of taste: 'Let's see what stands the test of time.'

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