Crossed wires: How one person's rubbish became another person's art

Nicolette has always been creative and enjoys drawing, sewing and knitting but one afternoon she saw her neighbour throwing out some chicken wire and thought she could make something with it.

"I’d seen garden ornaments made out of chicken wire so I had a play around with it and had a go at making a duck. My husband came home and saw it and said it actually did look like a duck," she says.

She was inspired to continue and, although her style hasn't changed over the three years she's been making, she has started making bigger pieces.

She enjoys making dogs and is sometimes asked to make sculptures of people's pets, often it's because the family pet has recently died so she works from a photo and does her best to make it look like their much-missed pet.

The larger sculptures can take a couple of weeks to make.

"I start my larger sculptures with a heavier gauge wire netting, creating the general form of the creature by bending and shaping the wire. I refer to this as the skeleton.

"I then use a smaller gauge wire to 'wrap' the skeleton, twisting the cut ends to join them together. A third layer is added over the top of this, placing the wire in the opposite direction (as it has a 'grain', much like a fabric). This gives it its overall strength.

"By choosing where to attach the wire, you can create the illusion of muscle and joints, also giving the finished sculpture a sense of movement," she says.

But it's not just large sculptures she makes, her creations come in all shapes and sizes.

She makes little robins for Christmas which only take a couple of hours to make, but take longer to decorate.

Even though the wire is galvanised, she paints them with primer and undercoat so they will survive being outside. She then paints a couple of top coats and then the finished models are mounted on branches.

"The detail has to be hand painted, I can’t spray paint them because the red breast of robin would end up on his back," she says.

After working in financial services for 30 years, Nicolette was made redundant four years ago. But determined not to sit around watching daytime TV, she now designates herself half a day, four out of five weekdays to work on her sculptures.

Creating sculptures from chicken wire can be a messy business: "I love to work outside, it’s easier to clean up but I do work in the spare room which is a mess. You can’t go in there without wearing shoes!"

Living on the south coast of Dorset, Nicolette takes inspiration from the wildlife that surrounds her and her love of dogs.

She is currently working on a series of sculptures that will feature in an exhibition at a local beauty spot's visitor centre. She has made a dozen dogs, which she started making in January, and the centre piece will be a pair of over-sized boxing hares.

MAKE! Craft Britain, coming soon to BBC Four