Carving No.5 belongs to a series of stone carvings from the early 1980s that Barry Flanagan made in association with craftspeople at Pietrasanta in Italy. He made maquettes by squeezing clay in his hands. These were then scaled up and copied in marble by Italian carvers who retained the features and finger-marks of the original clay model. By carving stone to look like modelled clay Flanagan is making a sculptural joke that seems to reference an enduring debate in modernist sculpture - the relative merits of carving and modelling.