All abstraction aside, Lynn Chadwick has always based his work on nature. His sculptures are largely based on human or animal forms. Although he attached great importance to the primacy of formal and technical considerations, he nevertheless expressed the fundamental conditions of life with the figures of humans and animals. The animals represent different states of aggression and vulnerability, as of their interaction, while the later figures depict details of human movement, interaction and sexuality.
Chadwick's sculptures appear archetypal, an aspect that is further reinforced by the later standardised form of the female and male heads as triangle and rectangle, which also appears in this work. In general, he concentrated on the relationship between inner tension and external force. Chadwick did not model his sculptures, he constructed them. His sculptural art clearly draws on architectural and drawing sources. Chadwick was a trained architect, yet worked only artistically after the war, initially mainly drawing. These prerequisites are easily recognisable in his steel sculptures: he first built a linear scaffolding or skeleton, onto which he applied a skin until the surface represented a solid form.
