From an article by Michael Burtch, 1987

Evan Penny’s works is surrounded by a marvellous silence that permits the viewer to wander about in a complex web of associations and meanings. To attempt to isolate the precise source of its strength is an exercise in futility. Penny has worked hard to neutralize traditional, over-articulated signs, such as narrative gesture and sexuality. What he presents is an invocation of the mute, inexplicable fact of human existence, a presence mediated by socially and culturally defined and constructed identities. The figures are offered up as inexplicable “others”, named subjects without subjecthood, yet they reflect back our own projections, our own both exalted and dreaded subjectivity.

Penny’s completed works carefully disguise the process of construction, but the process itself is never the less significant. Its significance rests primarily in the attitude assumed by the artist as he mediates between the model and the model’s objectification. He relies heavily, but not solely, on the raw visual data presented by his model. The subtle decisions that guide his hand and eye, however, help establish the deeper stratas of interpretation that deliberately confound an easy reading on the surface.

Working from a live model, Penny begins by building a clay figure over an armature. The modelling process is initially a documenting of the model’s topography. When the clay has been worked to the extent that it can be forwarded to the next stage, a plaster mould is taken, from which a bondo-fibreglass resin cast is made. The bondo provides a durable yet workable surface into which details can be finely articulated. The polyester figures are impeccably rendered, to reveal in varying degrees every nuance of the surface appearance of the subject, every muscle, vein, flaccid fold, and wrinkle. In the case of Ali, hair has been implanted strand by strand. The only retreat from the startling detail exemplified by Ali is the clearly modelled, shortly cropped hair of all the remaining figures, a concession to the unsculptural quality of hair. Examination of the surfaces reveals an interesting indexing of Penny’s working approach in the barely perceptible striations and hatching of the rapid strokes as he works over the surface with rasps. The verity of the detail belies the rapid energy of execution at this stage of the production.

When the bondo figure is completed, a flexible rubber mould capable of recording every minute detail is made and used to cast, in sections, the polyester resin and fibreglass that will make up the final work. Glass eyes are inserted while the work is in the section stage, as is the hardware to secure the piece to its base. The sections are carefully welded together with polyester resin, reworked, primed, and then painted in oils.

The original clay is often re-employed in the variations that follow the initial work. The bronze shadow figures are dramatic reworkings of the “original” to which they relate, and the torsos are salvaged and reworked after the moulding process has, like “time”, ravaged their “wholeness”. The bronzes, both full figure and torso, are foundry cast under the artist’s supervision and finished by him in the studio. They are given a patina, artificially aged, and in the case of Jim Torso, partially painted.

Each figure is constructed in a standing neutral pose, an attitude that reflects being as opposed to doing. The figures are mounted on stands to lift their actual two-thirds or four-fifths life-size stature to eye level. The polyester resin figures, the realistic figures, are painted in flesh tones that range from the hyper-articulated glow of Ali to the deathly pallor of earlier pieces such as Janet. They stand in the classic contraposta, with the weight of the body shifted to accommodate the supporting functional leg while the free leg is employed (like colour and hair treatment) to subtly motivate interpretations of the body’s attitude.

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