PRESS RELEASE
NIC BLADEN | Hinterland: Botanical Explorations
Oct 18 – Nov 16, 2024
NIC BLADEN | Hinterland: Botanical Explorations
18 October - 16 November 2024
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Everard Read London presents a new collection of 60 botanical sculptures by South African artist, Nic Bladen, one of the world’s finest botanical sculptors working today.
The exhibition is the culmination of the artist's journeys across southern Africa - including Namaqualand and the Karoo - resulting in a collection of works inspired by these evocative, arid landscapes.
Bladen's goal is to record biodiversity by creating unique bronze sculptures using the actual plant matter. With this new collection of works, the artist shines a light on the importance of and subtle and diverse beauty of succulents. Their allure and delicacy are heightened by the fact that the habitat of these plant species is being profoundly affected by climate change.
Bladen notes, “In the language of my own thoughts, ‘hinterland’ is about exploration. It is about travel, arriving and setting up camp, confronting new landscapes, finding unique plant specimens and then bringing them back. These journeys involve malaria, sleeping sickness - with a hint of bilharzia, encounters with adders and cobras, much conviction, and the final prize of bringing back to the world, word of the hinterland, the unknown: a place teeming with animals largely unknown, plants never before imagined, of shape, colour and abundance. “
“Some of the pieces here are extremely special to me”, continues Bladen, “because they have a very personal connection with a specific tract of land, or a particular memory. The sculpture Witkranzkameelperd refers to the plant I collected on Witkranz, a farm 80km northwest of Beaufort West, in the Great Karoo, on top of an escarpment where the summer and winter rainfall regions of South Africa meet. This tiny plant’s root system took two hours to dig out of soil as dry and hard as rock, during which time I was visited by a young bull giraffe, which, unbeknownst to me, stood ten meters away, his long neck dangling between his forelegs head upside down, staring at me. I almost jumped out of my skin when I saw the giraffe, who, in turn swung up that enormous neck and loped away towards the horizon. I still don’t have the correct Latin for that specimen. But giraffe being Giraffa camelopardalis, the nickname I gave to the piece stuck, and made for easy reference in the studio.”
“Many of the names of the plants in this body of work are beautifully descriptive”, observes Bladen. “Crassula congesta suggests flowering in abundance, congesta meaning ‘crowded together’. But the colloquial Afrikaans names of the pieces intrigue me more than the Latin. The collection of seven vygies speaks to this: koninginvygie (queen vygie), hasieore (hare ears), takbokkie (reindeer horns) are just three of these names which beautifully describe the various leaf shapes.”
All works in this collection are from arid regions of South Africa. They are all succulents. “They are also probings of my own hinterlands” says Bladen, “travels to areas unmapped, maybe always unmappable.”
Through the alchemical process that transpires in his studio’s furnaces, Bladen produces delicate artistic reconstructions of astoundingly beautiful flowering plants in bronze. The precision and care that goes into casting and reconstructing lifelike replicas is immense, and Bladen has become a master of his craft.
Nic Bladen has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at Everard Read galleries in South Africa and London.
This is his third solo exhibition with Everard Read London.
