Bushra Fakhoury: Sculpting on the Edge of Life

Raised across continents and guided by masters, Bushra Fakhoury, the British-Lebanese sculptor, turns myths, humour and raw conviction into monumental forms of solidarity

On a warm summer afternoon, over seven-step chakra tea at her son’s Mandrake Hotel — a lush, art-filled oasis in the city — Bushra Fakhoury reflected on the restless journey that has shaped her life, work, and ultimately her practice. Born in Lebanon and raised between Beirut, the Ivory Coast, and France, she began sculpting as a child in a Catholic convent, fashioning flowers and animals out of marzipan.

That early act of play became a lifelong practice, one that now spans monumental bronzes, delicate ceramics and playful assemblages of objects rescued from street markets.

I’ve learned that if you have an idea, you should never stop following it. The impossible can be possible, and you should never say “never.”

Bushra Fakhoury

Fakhoury speaks with the candour of someone who has lived across continents and refuses to separate life from art. “Everything begins here, in my head,” she explained of her instinctive, sketchless process — ideas arriving in dreams or sparked by something as ordinary as a sandwich, then realised at scale with a single knife and her own momentum. She approaches balance in her towering works with what she calls “common sense”, though she admits that she seeks to push forms to the edge, as if echoing her belief that “life itself is on the edge”.

If humour and spontaneity drive her process, her sculptures are also charged with moral urgency. She has crushed bullets in bronze to speak against war and stripped her dancing figures bare to critique materialism. “The mask,” she said of one work, “shows how we hide, though underneath we are all the same.” For Fakhoury, art is not only form and material but a call for solidarity — an insistence, born of a childhood that spanned cultures and a family that spans faiths, that the world is one.

You’ve lived across continents — Beirut, the Ivory Coast, France, Kenya and England. How have these shifts in geography and culture imprinted themselves on the textures, forms and symbols that recur throughout your work?

Bushra Fakhoury: Well, all these travels and meetings with people from different cultures – I have always tried, wherever I go, to learn the language, because it is good to communicate with people, and it shows respect at the same time. It has also enriched my personality, giving me many different facets shaped by various countries and people.

That is why, whatever I cannot express in words, I express through my sculpture – and people respond to it. So, when people ask me to talk about my work, I say it should speak for itself, though a little explanation is fine.

Your art draws deeply from myths, fables and folklore. Do you see these tales as fixed inheritances, or as living narratives that transform in response to the urgencies of the present?

Bushra Fakhoury: When I first started working, I was influenced by myths, mythology, and all of that. But as I began engaging with underprivileged people and witnessing the problems of the world, my focus shifted. Now, my work is mainly about society and people – the psyche, what they should and should not do, particularly through education and vocation.

You work without preliminary sketches, embracing the risks and freedoms of spontaneity. Can you recall a moment when this instinctive approach led to an unforeseen breakthrough in your practice?

Bushra Fakhoury: First of all, I don’t do sketches. I never do sketches. My ideas come to me in the moment – like now, just sitting here, I might look at a sandwich and think of something else, and that becomes a sculpture. Sometimes I even see it in my dreams, already finished. If I like the idea, I want to make it – and it might take me nine months.

I started working this way because everything happens here, in my head. That’s why, when I begin a piece, I often finish it quickly – sometimes in a week – because it’s already fully formed in my mind. And because I’ve lived among different cultures and relationships, I know exactly how the human figure is, and how animals are.

For example, I might make a small sculpture at home, then take it to Liverpool. There, they ask me to enlarge it – to one metre, say. From that one metre version, using a pantograph, they scale it up to eight or even twelve metres. The team builds the skeleton in metal, puts up scaffolding, and prepares the structure.

Then I work directly on it. I have an assistant who simply passes me the clay. The base might be wires or pipes, but I work straight on top. You can see it in my pieces – like this woman here – I climb up and down like a monkey with my big knife. That’s all I use: one big knife. I just work straight away. The form of the elephant, or the human figure – it’s all there, already in my mind.

Dunamis stands as a towering feat of balance and strength, yet it is also a meditation on compassion and solidarity. How do you navigate the delicate interplay between fragility and power in your sculptures?

Bushra Fakhoury: Well, the power comes from my experience and my personality. I’ve learned that if you have an idea, you should never stop following it. The impossible can be possible, and you should never say “never.”

As for balance, it comes naturally to me. Sometimes people ask, “Have you studied architecture or engineering?” and I say, “No, it’s just common sense.” If you put something here, then to balance it you must put something there. I always want my work to be on the edge. I don’t know why – perhaps because life itself is on the edge. And then you find humour in it. I think life without a sense of humour is dull, so I always put a little humour into my work.

As for solidarity, I want people in general to live with solidarity. That’s why I created Dance. I made the figures naked, because I don’t place any importance on material things. Perhaps that comes from my upbringing in a convent, where we had no contact with the outside world. Because of that, I never learned to value material things, so I strip them away in my work.

The mask represents how we always hide behind something. Yet we all have so much to give, and we should share it. That’s my message: share the wealth of the world with everyone. I don’t care if someone is Muslim or Christian – for God’s sake, live and let live. Who cares? My own family includes Muslims, Christians, and Jews, and we are all happy together. I have never in my life thought, “Why is this person like this, or why is that person like that?” It’s like wearing different clothes – I wear this, you wear that – but underneath, we’re all the same.

I think, personally, that people don’t always like to hear this – but when you are a child, it’s important to be taught some religion, at least in the sense of the Ten Commandments. They apply to all faiths: be good, help one another, don’t betray your neighbour, and so on. If you know those basic principles, that’s enough.

I don’t believe you need, all through life, someone saying: If you don’t do this, you’ll be punished. If you don’t do this, you’ll go to hell. Or: My God is better than your God, so I’ll kill you. For God’s sake – that is ignorance and arrogance. And too often it’s encouraged, because people use it to dominate others and take their money.

Instead, we should learn from history, and we should learn from everyday life – to love one another, to share with one another, to feel as if we are all one big family. I don’t know why people don’t talk more about this; I have no idea. In my work, when I want to criticise, for example, rape, I create a penis with a hand crushing it – and I say, No. I won’t come near you [laugh].

For war, I made a hand gripping a bullet, crushing it. I speak through my sculpture, criticising violence. I wish – I truly wish – there were no weapons factories, no wars, no ammunition. That we could all simply live, share, and break bread together, across all religions.

You know, once animals carried us – riding from one village or country to another on a donkey. Now we have Teslas. But if something happens to the battery, it explodes.

So, you see, there are always positives and negatives. You don’t need to dwell on the negatives. The positive is that life is too short. People don’t realise – yesterday I was 20, today I’m 30, and still it feels too short. So live, and be happy. Anyway, I try to show this in my work as much as I can.

With Transmute, you channel your anger at deforestation into form and material. What threshold must an issue cross — emotionally or ethically — before it becomes unavoidable in your art?

Bushra Fakhoury: You know, I can’t help but be influenced by nature. I lived in the forest, and I know how many birds, insects, and forms of life are there. And then companies come, just for money, and it really upsets me. They come and cut down the trees – why? Because they want to build roads, or because they want to make landing strips so tourists can come and look at indigenous people. It’s ridiculous.

I don’t understand. Where is the humanity in that? I think we are supposed to be normal, but perhaps I’m not in step with the world. Still, I don’t understand why some people are so cruel – people who kill, who rape. Where do they come from? Sometimes I think perhaps they are aliens. Or perhaps they are drugged. That must be why they do such terrible things.

Your public works — Dunamis, Danse Gwenedour — inhabit spaces where audiences encounter them unexpectedly. How do you design for that unplanned, momentary engagement with a passer-by?

Bushra Fakhoury: Engagement is the result of my time living in Africa, among the animals. I wanted to give homage to the elephant – that’s why I created a man holding the elephant high, as a gesture of respect. The man wears a hat, but it is not a clown’s hat. It represents society through the ages – like the pointed hats worn in St Mary’s processions, or by the Phoenicians. These hats symbolise different generations and cultures across history.

In your use of objets trouvés — from market stalls in Europe to driftwood gathered along riverbanks — how do you decide whether an object’s existing story should be preserved or transformed beyond recognition?

Bushra Fakhoury: Objets trouvés – Whenever I go abroad, not here, I don’t try to shop for clothes. The objects, they call me. Instead, the objects call me. I look at something, and it’s attractive, so I buy it. And immediately, once it’s in my hand, I know what to do with it. It talks to me. I do these welding pieces, and I find them fun. For me, they are fun. They do speak – there is a message in them, though not as strong as the ones I create in bronze.

Often they come from markets, markets everywhere I go. Even now, when I go shopping, I might find something on the street, bring it home, or use it myself, and I put something else outside. Or I use it for my sculpture. I weld it, if it’s metal. Recycling [laugh].

You studied under Stanislaw Frenkiel, Eduardo Paolozzi and Elisabeth Frink. Beyond questions of technique, what enduring ways of thinking about art did they instil in you?

Bushra Fakhoury: Stanislaw Frenkiel, the Polish artist, also taught at London University. I was friendly with him, his wife, and daughter. He was a good artist, and he influenced my work a lot.

He kept telling me: “He told me that when you do something, you exaggerate the feature to make it strong, you know. And you always try to see the object with the space that’s in between, like here, not only the object. I want to see how it relates to the space around you. You know this is very important, and everything you have to exaggerate.”

And he influenced me a lot in my work. He influenced my son, Mal, too. He taught him a lot, you know — to be free and to also be forceful and expressive, to be expressive openly, not to be afraid of a subject.

Oh Eduardo. Elizabeth Frank. So Eduardo. Me and my children, we were in Tate Britain with my boys, and they told me, “Oh, Eduardo is there. We dare you to go and talk to him.”

This is how I met him. He had his hand behind his back and I went straight away to him.

I said, “No way. Of course I go.” I went straight away, and I said, “Good afternoon, Mr Paolozzi. My name is Bushra Fakhoury. Uh, can I have a word with you? I admire your work.”
He said, “Yes.” He told me, “You’re a sculptor.”
I said, “Yes.”
He said, “Show me your hands.”
I showed him my hand. I said, “Is that all?”

Then he asked, “What car do you drive?”
“A van,” I answered.
He said, “That’s a good sign.”
Then he asked, “Are you married?”
“No, I’m divorced.”
“Typical – that’s why you’re a sculptor.”
I said, “No – I’ve been a sculptor since I was seven years old.”
And then he said, “Let’s meet for a drink at the Chelsea Arts Club.” From then on, I used to see him there regularly.

Once, I went to Africa for a while. When I came back and asked after Eduardo, they told me he was in a Bupa hospital. I went to see him, and I was shocked – he was in a terrible state, with an open wound on his leg, his shirt torn. I said to the staff, “Do you realise who this man is? He is one of your greatest sculptors in England – why is he being neglected like this?” I lifted his legs to ease the wound, and the next day I brought him shirts and jumpers. They told me that when he heard Bushra was coming, he walked – for the first time in a long time – to a small seat by the bed to meet me.

At the Chelsea Arts Club, I showed him both my work and my son’s. He said, “Your work is okay, but your son’s work is fantastic. But don’t tell him – it will go to his head.”

My son never cared much for praise, though. He always wanted to work alone. He said, “I came to this earth to finish what I started.” Perhaps it was his Buddhist philosophy – believing in another life, before or after – that gave him such focus.

Eduardo and I became friends. Sadly, he passed away. I thought it had been only a few years, but when I mentioned it to someone, they said, “What do you mean? It’s been twenty years already.” Time passes so quickly. Eduardo influenced me deeply, not only through his sculpture but through his way of approaching different kinds of work altogether.

He said, “But don’t tell him, because it will go to his head, you know.” But my son always wanted to work alone. He didn’t care what people said, what people admired or not. He always told me, “I came to this earth to finish what I started.” So, being with Buddhist philosophy, perhaps they do believe in another life, before or after, or whatever. Yeah, so we became friends. Unfortunately, he passed away.

Bushra Fakhoury: TRANSMUTE opens on the 7th of October, 2025 until the 11th of October, 2025 at Mall Galleries’ North Gallery

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