Fairy lady Sam Bryan marks 20 years of making fairies with an book and exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

“I’m not a fairy person, if that makes sense,” she says.

Samantha, who is 43, has a modern studio at the bottom of the garden behind her house in Mirfield, West Yorkshire. In there she makes sculptures that sell all over the world, fetching between £700 and £800 on average. An exhibition of her work opens on September 17 at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. An accompanying book, 20 Years A Maker, charting her unusual career will be launched there on October 1.

As we sit down in that studio, hemmed in by shelves and boxes containing bright buttons and spotted feathers for wings, acorn caps, ready-made fairy feet, bundles of dyed leather from old gloves, pieces of old plastic, and almost anything else that has caught her eye, let’s ask the obvious question: why fairies?

Samantha takes us back two decades to Hereford College of Art. One of the lecturers set a brief to create a witty Christmas character, and she thought a fairy might do. “The first fairy was very traditional looking but there were elements of that character that had some success,” she says. “I was just building on it and looking at beetles and bugs and plants and looking at different shapes. The first fairy was very bulbous because it was taken off a beetle’s bum, and they are still quite bulbous.”

That tutor clearly did her a good turn.

“Yes, he was a very quirky tutor and he’s responsible for a lot of people like me who are out there making,” says Samantha. He had elbow patches on his jumpers. In an unconscious tribute, she recently realised, she puts those patches on her fairies. These are not your usual fairies but are perhaps akin to long-legged worker ants operating all manner of fanciful contraptions, helicopters built from vintage tin cans to a fairy ant flying a plane with an old juggler’s pin for a fuselage.

“You’ll notice that the eyes are far apart, and they have big bottoms,” Samantha says, pointing to an unfinished fairy on her desk, adding that her early fairies were inspired by pictures of bugs with their eyes on the side. “They were a winged creature and with that they could become a vehicle for the humour I’ve always wanted to capture. If they were not fairies, what would they be?”

Her fairies have different stories, different tasks. The one on the workbench in front of us wears roller skates for more efficient sprinkling of dust.

“The fairies, you see, spend an awful lot of time collecting, distributing, and processing dust. And they are very overworked and don’t have a lot of free time, so any gadgets help.” The acorn caps make “the standard-issue fairy helmets”, while larger caps are for clumsy fairies who require crash helmets.

Samantha is always on the hunt for accessories.

“I’ve been doing it for so long now that I walk around with that radar and I see something and think, ‘Oh, yes, I could to a fairy version of that. It comes quite naturally’.”

From car boot sales and second-hand markets, she picks up all sorts. “I love old bits of wood that are strange shapes, I love old plastic with slightly faded colours, I like books. I think it’s probably the faded, dog-eared aesthetic of things that appeals,” she says.

Every piece for the exhibition will be newly made, with some sculptures using old and treasured finds. “I’ve got a thing with everything in life where I want to save it for best. For instance, that beautiful patterned wooden wheel there, the big cog, I’ve had it years and years.”

Is it just waiting?

“It is but I can’t bring myself to part with it. But with this show I am really trying to take another step and let the lovely things go out into the world. The fairy flyer over there is a vintage juggling pin from Australia.”

That fairy has an acorn helmet and flying muffs, while his transport boasts a propeller from a model aeroplane. The tail is an “old bit of brass that I’ve hammered the number into. I solder and weld and things like that. Brass is bright yellow but to get that old colour you chemically treat it until it is antique-i-fied.”

Pausing to wonder if that’s a word, Samantha explains how her way of working has changed. She used to have waiting lists and held workshops and staged many exhibitions but found she was stretched too thinly. And that was before she had her children, aged three-and-half and nine months.

“When I had my first little boy, I realised that I couldn’t go back and work those hours, I just couldn’t do it. I had to take a bit of a leap of faith. I closed my waiting list and said no to workshops. I decided to just make what I wanted to make. I’ll make maybe eight or nine pieces every two months and then I release them, and they’ve been selling out in six or seven minutes.”

She returned from maternity leave two months ago, since when she has been working flat out for the exhibition.

Her delightfully eclectic work attracts collectors.

“I’m lucky because people invest into the world. A lady messaged me to say that she had nine. She might be my biggest collector. She collected right from when I first graduated.”

The fairies in the exhibition will be for sale. Does she think they will sell out, too? “I don’t take anything for granted. It’s been a long process to selling so well. It’s not an easy career to forge. Nobody needs a fairy, it’s a real luxury market..”

Samantha’s fairies would seem to be a natural fit for an animation, and she has been approached by animators. “It’s finding the right fit. I’ve closed down a few opportunities. I had an agent in London, we were working towards something, but it just didn’t feel right. But there will be something one day.”

She has always wanted to write a children’s book too and hopes this will also happen.

Samantha types a snippet of story for each fairy. An old blue Silver Reed Silverette portable typewriter sits on the side, with these words bashed out on a sheet of paper: “Fairies do exist...”

Above the typewriter is a shuttle from a

weaving machine or mill. When she saw it, Samantha thought “Chinook-style helicopter with

a double propeller” and that’s what it will be one day.

A shiny star-shaped object turns out to be an air conditioning fan, given to her by Holmfirth sculptor Mick Kirkby-Geddes. “I used to have a studio in Huddersfield, and he used to bring all the bits he didn’t use, and he gave me that and it’s beautiful and it would go on so many things”

The fairies’ bodies are made of leather because it doesn’t fray. Samantha used to dye the leather herself, but it tended to fade.

“A lot of the original fairies are anaemic now, but if I use leather from surplus glove supplies, it’s had a chemical process that means it’s fast.”

A good job as no-one wants an anaemic fairy.

Samantha Bryan: The Adventure So Far runs at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park from September 17 until October 23.