This study for Tucker’s powerful bronze 'Cave', currently situated outside the RA, shows the artist’s unique way of abstracting the figure. Tucker finds balance in forms that aim to fragment and distort, and which present themselves as an organic state, as with the natural human body, rather than as a refined and finished product. The ambiguity of reference to the human figure brings the possibility of a new kind of figuration in sculpture in which the image emerges from both an inner perception of the body and an outer perception of volume and surface.