For the past few years, my work has explored the intersections between the natural world, human existence, and the things we create for fun—like sculpture—highlighting moments where environment, structure, materials, and consciousness collide. I use sculpture, installation, sound, writing, and film as sites for these encounters. I approach materials conceptually, interpreting them through experimental, improvised processes using drawing, 3D designs, and maquettes. I then develop these ‘sketches’ into coherent forms that, to me, make philosophical, poetic, and conceptual sense. Through this practice, I hope to create evocative, metaphorical, and otherworldly works that invite atmospheric reflection on our complex, beautiful, and often difficult relationship with the world.
Each project begins with research and experimentation, bringing contemporary perspectives to art historical sources and traditional themes of sculpture, especially materials, time, technique, structure, and form. I am drawn to the enduring legacy of repeated ‘classical’ forms that have evolved over centuries, and I often explore esoteric subjects from the past, including sacred geometry, folk art, fairy tales, popular mythology, ancient landscapes, architecture, stories, ritual, and ceremony. I reinterpret these through a contemporary lens of modernism, postmodernism, science, popular culture (books, film, music), and technology, creating works that provoke reflection on memory and history.
I am interested in works that function as metaphors, poems, and psychological games, shaped by my own personal history, which is in turn inseparable from the history of the time I have lived through. The works are often made in series or ‘albums’ which allow me to fully explore the ideas through a number of iterations; they offer glimpses into speculative worlds, presenting interconnected ideas that allow for imaginative, playful mental travels, and in doing so, they become a way of making sense of both the world we inhabit and the inner worlds we carry within ourselves.
evansrichardnik(at)gmail.com