St Ives-based artist (originally an ornithologist) who took up wood-carving when Dutch elm disease destroyed the trees in his garden: 'The most important thing is to capture the life of a living creature in a piece of wood.  Metal is a dead material and hasn't got the essence of the animal you're dealing with - wood expresses this best.  If you are looking at something which is living and taken millions of years to evolve its form, it seems an effrontery to abstract from that and turn it into something else.'