Artist: Nicola Hicks

Here we are, in this ever more frightening world, where war is far too small a word for our most devastating occupation. We have woken the Tiger. Again.

So what does Nicola Hicks give us? LOVE – Keggie Carew*

Messums London presents Nicola Hicks MBE FRSS ‘Love’, an exhibition that celebrates our enduring connection to the natural world. The show brings together a series of raw plaster sculptures shown alongside limited edition prints and drawings. Love invites viewers to feel those emotional states that flow not just between us but throughout our wider ecology where fragility, tenderness and strength understand each other. The work conveys our sensed connection to one another and the cohabiting flora and fauna of the planet. It is not escapism into fields of fawn eyed animalia and rolling hills. This a radical act, a dilatant stand against a rising wave of violence wrought by a cruelty that only humanity can conceive, held together by bonds created from love.

Born in London in 1960, Nicola Hicks studied at Chelsea School of Art (1979-1982), before gaining an MA from the Royal College of Art, London, in 1985. She defied the dominance of abstract art in the 1980s, forging a path centred on figuration and raw natural beauty. Working mainly with plaster and straw, her final sculptures are cast in bronze – the contrast between the materials used to construct the maquettes with the solidity and permanence of bronze imbuing the work with a simultaneous feeling of fragility and strength. Hicks is unafraid of exploring darker content in her work, and her often monumental sculptures routinely use anthropomorphism to raise questions about human and animal nature, depicting humanised animals and beast-like humans. ‘I love the magical feeling of having something evolve at my fingertips’, she says; ‘making something live that hasn’t lived before’.

Hicks’ work features in prestigious collections and public spaces worldwide, including the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven and Battersea Park in London. She was awarded an MBE in 1995 for her contribution to the arts and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Sculptors in 2023.

* Keggie Carew, author of ‘BEASTLY: The Epic 40,000-Year Story of Animals and Us’