Eduardo Paolozzi attended Edinburgh College of Art, St Martin's School of Art in London, and then studied sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art. From 1947 to 1949, he lived in Paris where he met Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Léger, Alberto Giacometti and Tristan Tzara. He returned to London, and from 1949 to 1950 he taught textile design at the Central School of Art and Design whilst also designing collages for interior design patterns such as printed fabrics and wallpapers. From 1955 to 1958 he taught sculpture at St Martin's School of Art, London. In 1956, he obtained a grant from the Copley Foundation. During the 1960s he taught at the Royal College of Art, London, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Hochscule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg. He was Professor of Ceramics at the Fachhochschule, Cologne, from 1977 to 1981, and then Professor of Sculpture at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich. He was awarded a CBE in 1968, elected to the Royal Academy in 1979, and knighted in 1986. Eduardo Paolozzi’s monumental statue, ‘Vulcan’ (1999), named after the Roman God of Fire, has its basis in many different facets of Paolozzi’s long, illustrious and varied career. In 1988 Paolozzi created the forerunner of ‘Vulcan’ with the work ‘The Artist as Hephaestus’ (the Greek original of the Roman God of Fire), embodying a certain kind of alter-ego, a semi-self-portrait (and thereby implying the artist’s own god-like powers of creation). But the origins of Vulcan go back much later than 1988; they can be seen in some of the earliest works of Paolozzi’s career, such as the near-phrenological head, ‘Mr Cruickshank’ of 1950, based upon the dummy used by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to measure radiation of the head). These human heads reappear in the 1980s, with such iconic portrait busts as ‘Count Basie’ and ‘Yukio Mishima’ cast in bronze from a cast of recycled and unusual materials. The essential principle underlying this development is Paolozzi’s assertion that “all human experience is just one big collage”. Even earlier in his career, when Paolozzi met Jean Arp in Paris in the late 1940s and was influenced by the work of Ernst and Schwitters, he began to create imagery based upon surrealist strategies of collage. He was less concerned with the bizarre conjunctions of images than formal deconstruction. He mixed together multifarious detritus of human experiences, a reckless medley of images from science magazines, technical manuals, girlie mags and movie fanzines. Ever ready to embrace the vitality of the demotic, he culled from ‘Time’ magazine covers in 1950 a diverse group of portraits (politicians, films stars etc.) and created hybrids from them after horizontal and vertical sagittal dissections. ‘Vulcan’, part mythological, part mechanical, barely human, closesly relates to these formal strategies of cut and slice, a kind of sculptural surgery and moreover, his casting technique has been compared to his collage practice - a process of building up wax and adding objects. Throughout his career, Paolozzi's sculpture was concerned with the overlap between man and machine, between present and future, between flesh and metal. Exhibitions such as This is Tomorrow (1956) and Man, Machine and Motion (1955) explored the liminal space between the human, the industrial, the mythological and the technological, and the possibilities that an ever approaching future held for the human form. A fascination with popular culture representations of cyborgs, automata, cybernetics, robots and hybrids proclaimed that a terrifying dehumanisation of the figure was the inevitable consequence of modern advancements. Like Richard Hamilton, who had trained as an electrical engineer, Paolozzi was fascinated with industrial processes and manufacturing, collaborating during the 1960s with industrial engineering firms. ‘Vulcan’ epitomizes the mechanomorphic: somewhere in his phylogeny lurks the automata of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the robots of Schlemmer’s Mechanical Ballet, or the toy monsters from Paolozzi’s ‘Krazy Kat Archive’ (his amazing collection of pop cultural objects – many now in the Victoria and Albert Museum). Although ‘Vulcan’ is from disparate mechanical parts, his genetic code includes elements from both Arcimboldo and Dubuffet. ‘Vulcan’ is not soulless though. When Virgil wrote in the Aeneid: Scooped out by the action of the Cyclops fires; you can hear The clang of hard blows on the anvils, the roaring masses of ore Are smelted within, and a throbbing blast of flame from the furnaces. Here is Vulcan’s place; he was invoking a vigour and power that characterizes Sir Eduardo Paolozzi’s sculpture.