A PAIR of gold Burmese Dancers have returned to Portmeirion.

The original statues are too old to be put back in place, so Nigel Simmons - sculptor for Portmeirion - was tasked with recreating both the male and female dancing statues.

Simmons started the process in February 2018 by cleaning the original statues and filling in missing and broken pieces with wax before casting each section of the statue in silicone rubber.

Nigel used a series of photographs of the original statues to piece together some of the missing elements including head dress, hands and even the back of one of the dancers’ heads.

Next, Simmons put a plaster of Paris coating on each silicone section before casting it in glass fibre.

Each glass fibre section was then fitted together, before being coated in gold leaf.

The project has taken six months to complete.

They original statues will remain in Portmeirion’s archive under the care of their collections manager.

The Burmese Dancers are associated with the 19th century court arts of Mandalay, Burma, marked by flamboyant costume details.

But it is a bit of a mystery how two Burmese dancing statues found their way to an Italianate village on the coast of Snowdonia.

Read the full story in this week’s County Echo, on sale tomorrow