3 minute read
A Fox to Remember at Middleburg Community Center
A Fox to Remember at Middleburg Community Center
By Joe Motheral
In 2016, Jamie Gaucher, then the Town of Middleburg’s Director of Business and Economic Development, came to sculptor Goksin Carey and asked, “Would you like to sculpt a fox?”
“What kind of fox do you want?” Goksin asked.
“We want a six-foot fox,” came the reply.
“I said, ‘okay, let's do it.’”
The result: what has become that iconic fox sculpture located in front of the Middleburg Community Center.
“It took three weeks to do the sculpture,” Goksin said. “My students assisted me with warming the clay and the metal framework. It was a big project.” She was fortunate to have a taxidermy fox to use as a prototype. It was, she said, “a fox in action, jumping out. I always worked with the eyes. The eyes need to talk to you. If they don’t talk to you then it won’t get into action.”
Once the sculpture was coated in bronze, it was unveiled at the 2019 Middleburg Christmas Parade. “One thing I noticed was people coming by touching the fox’s nose,” she said. “They say when they do that they have luck.”
A native of Turkey, Goksin said, “I love horses. I did commissions and I’m working on two large fighting horses now.”
The community center fox project cost $30,000 and was funded by donations from multiple organizations and individuals, including $10,000 from the town, and various amounts from the Middleburg Garden Club, local businesses, residents and raffle ticket sales.
Jamie Gaucher felt the town needed to personify its heritage, which includes a long history of fox hunting. A New York City native, Gaucher said the town could accomplish that goal with an installment similar to the 11-by-16-foot charging bull sculpture on Wall Street.
Goksin still teaches at AIM and at the National Sporting Library. She’s been working on a statue of Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey. “I’m hoping it will be in the Turkish consulates all over the U.S.,” she said.
She described her sculpting process as working from the inside out, starting with the skeleton then the muscles and the skin.
She explained how she got started working with clay to form the figures of horses. “I couldn’t draw a line. At this age of 50 my dream told me to sculpt horses…I went to the ‘clay house’ and said I wanted to sculpt horses. And they laughed at me. Sculpt something easy they said.”
She paid no attention and began doing equine sculpture. She wanted her work critiqued, so she went to the America Academy of Equine Art, where she spent one week attending an equine sculpting workshop.
“You don’t know art,” she said, adding she was told, but “the composition is good. We will teach you the sculpting technology and you are ready to fly.”
