34-year-old former South Wales Police community officer became an artist specializing in wire sculpture. Candice Bees has been previously trained as an illustrator and has long studied animal anatomy and movement in detail, which led her to leave her previous job to pursue a full-time art career.
Ms. Bees’s wire menagerie includes rats, hares, birds, wolves and even a full-size deer. She says her first sculptures were relatively small but after the initial success in this wire-bending art form, she tries to “push the concept as far as possible” while she still continues to study the behavior of animals in their natural habitat – which was the initial motivation behind her art career.
Bees says the message she tries to get to people with her art is mostly an appreciation of the subtle side of nature which remains overlooked for the bold monumentalism in sculpture. She insists her animals made of wire display the fragility of nature and the impact humans can have on the life all around us.
Her sculptures have received recognition at the Bath Open Art Show in 2017 as People’s Choice Award, and she won the David Shepherd Wildlife Artist of the Year award in 2016 in the Urban Wildlife category. She’s had multiple exhibitions but still thinks her pieces look best in a natural setting.
