Nick Bawn Cheshire, United Kingdom

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I’m a mixed-media sculptor. I choose materials for what they express, from pencils and acrylic, to clay and resin, building dense structures from many identical hand-made elements. The work asks whether the systems we build to hold ourselves together are solid ground or a trap.

Order is not the same as peace. My practice begins from a paradox: nature uses repetition to grow, while the anxious mind uses it to loop. I treat repetition as a physical act rather than an idea, making hundreds of identical, hand-worked elements until the accumulated mass develops its own tension and presence. Anxiety is my subject but structure is my concern: how repetition, routine and rules can hold a person up or hold them in.

I work across materials because each idea demands its own. The material is part of the meaning, never a default. Each series tests a different material and pressure -

The slowness is the point. These structures ask whether what we build to survive is holding us up or holding us in. And Bloom suggests the answer can change: the grid can start to let the air back in.