RICHARD NIK EVANS

2013
Steel, resin, moss, clock pendulum bob, glass, lacquer, wax
101 x 64 X 64 cm

(0) features a pendulum from a mid-century clock, locked in time - taken from a machine and attached to a sculpture. Current time, digital time is impeccably accurate, inhumanly so. Clockwork time is perceptively moving, always, even if only slightly, slowing down. It needs attention. Sculpture is frozen meaning, its aim is to articulate the artist’s thoughts and present them - possibly arrogantly, definitely pretentiously - ‘forever.’

The bronze shield-like form - the pendulum - is bolted to a skeletal steel structure, coated in moss preserved in clear resin. It was cast from melted wax which was smothered over the armature - a material presented in a state of transition.

The whole form leans awkwardly, as if slipping or failing, but still holds. Beneath it, a pane of glass rests on a square of moss, suggesting both preservation and burial — part specimen slide, part discarded glazier’s scrap.

The scene seems to hesitate — between solidity and collapse, action and stasis, the uncontrollable movement of time and the control we want over earthly materials.

2013 - 2015 
Resin, moss, pigment, pewter
78.7 x 106.7 x 11.4 cm

Bulb is one of the most pared-back works in the Frozen Moss series — a bisected triangle, like a drooping party hat, cleaved at its apex to reveal a cast pewter bulb, perched with improbable uprightness. 

The form echoes Jasper Johns’s Light Bulb, 1958, but here it resists illumination. Instead of a rounded, flower-like bulb, this one takes a modern form — the spiral — a symbolic descent that draws the eye downwards, from the bulb’s dull patina to the silver-nitrate-darkened moss below.

The moss is fossilised in resin and silver nitrate. The bulb is designed to emit light; the silver nitrate to react to it.

There’s a deliberate uncanniness here — domesticity interrupted. The familiar is made strange in a way that recalls Robert Gober’s transformations of the everyday, but that strangeness is met by nature’s own unruliness. The spiral becomes a path for the eye — and a philosophical one. As Václav Havel wrote, “Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it.”

2014
Resin, moss, steel, silver nitrate, pigment, pewter
135.89 x 73.6 x 35.5 cm

This discombobulated wall relief reads like a ruin or an altar: part sculpture, part plant, part disintegrating shelf. The moss mimics the way nature paints in its own time — spreading across rocks, creeping up facades, making its own silent reliefs, a soft skin.

Balanced atop a slender steel rod is a tailor’s block supporting a cast pewter apple and a pair of small, delicate forms — moulded from the artist’s own nipples — blending body, landscape, and object.

Pewter, with its historical links to sacred vessels, transforms the shelf into a kind of table of offerings. The resin, chosen for its glass-like clarity, preserves the moss’s soft green textures like a specimen in a museum. But silver nitrate, added during casting, slowly darkens from within — leaching through the moss like a quiet poison.

The moss-glass becomes a prophetic lens held up to nature, religiously presenting a frozen, corrupted, inedible apple.

2015
Resin, moss, pigment, Mosin-Nagant M44 bayonet
55.8 x 55.8 x 5 cm

Bay-onette draws its title from a fusion of “bay” and “bayonet,” pairing geography with violence, nature with war. It is a relief formed through traditional casting techniques combined with an object that carries both political and formal weight. 

I used a casting process with rubber molds and fibreglass shells to cast melted wax triangles to create two solid resin forms. Inside these, moss mixed with polyester resin was left to ‘go off’ in specially made wooden boxes, which I mounted on disused air-conditioner brackets outside my Brooklyn studio. 

The WW2 bayonet is a symbol of war, but here it also creates a more dominant figure: the triangle — a shape often seen as sacred or spiritual, sometimes directly referencing the Holy Trinity. It serves as a kind of wedge, like the tool you use to prise open a mold. That act of prizing open becomes a metaphor — for revealing meaning, exposing history, and questioning culture’s strange relationship with nature.

It hangs precariously on the gallery wall, holding itself up. The moss supports the steel. The resulting symbol falls between the organic, the political and the architectural, between sacred geometry and blunt force.

2013
Resin, photographic silver nitrate powder
40.6 x 19 x 3 cm

Hole (AGNO₃) is a small resin cast taken from a melted wax triangle, infused with silver nitrate — a light-sensitive chemical traditionally used in early photography. Initially transparent, the piece darkens over time, slowly developing a surface patina of blacks and deep browns in response to its exposure to light. The rate and character of this transformation are determined entirely by where the work is placed — how much sun it receives, from what angle, and for how long. Over months or even years, it may eventually turn completely black. As such, the work is inherently site-specific, quietly reactive, and always in flux.