Paolozzi’s art mirrored a wide range of ideas, resulting in a broad range of subject matter explored through unconventional and imaginative sculptural forms. This collection represents a fragment of Paolozzi's sculptural output, with subjects as disparate as a pair of crickets mating, a car engine, a turreted castle and a single human ear. Some of these maquettes are experiments that were never realised, whilst others were used as models for much larger works in bronze. To turn these maquettes into bronze sculptures Paolozzi used the lost-wax method. A rubber mould is first made around the plaster, and then filled with molten wax, to leave a perfect wax version of the maquette. The wax is then surrounded with plaster to make a further mould, and melted out by molten bronze which replaces it. The seated figure in the centre of this display was cast in this way and enlarged to create the five metre tall self-portrait in bronze, ‘The Artist as Hephaestus’.