PREVIEW: Friday 7 March 2025, from 6pm  BOOK PLACE

Messums is thrilled to announce the first solo retrospective of Nicola Hicks MBE FRSS – one of the most significant British sculptors of the 21st century. In celebration of the artist’s 65th birthday, the gallery will present more than 30 exceptional works, drawn from each major series of Hicks’ career to date. The magnificent 13th century tithe barn at Messums West will be the setting for this visual journey through the anthropomorphic, allegorical world of the artist, revealing her vision of humanity and the modern world, and exploring her idiosyncratic visual language that has garnered her enormous acclaim over the past four decades.

Hicks’ work is introspective and hugely personal, often referencing specific moments or stories drawn from her own life; however, her subject matter is eminently relatable. Her technically brilliant, largely anthropomorphic sculptures touch upon her experiences of being a woman, motherhood, struggles with mental health (encountered both first- and second-hand), as well as the personal and collective trauma caused by conflict, greed and environmental and societal destruction. Although her themes could be perceived as somewhat bleak, Hicks’ work nevertheless emanates humour and is part of a rich tradition of social commentary in British art stretching back to William Hogarth’s Gin Lane. It is a celebration of humanity – its glories and its flaws – recognising the darkness that exists in the world and expressing it in sculptures of immense beauty.

The works on show date from the 1990s to the present and include a new series created especially for the exhibition. The exhibition offers for sale, in some cases for the first time, her extraordinary plaster ‘sketches’ – the original, unique artworks (also available in limited bronze editions), painted black or left as white plaster, created through a fluid and organic process of building up form in plaster and straw on a metal armature. Raw, instinctual, fragile and overwhelmingly sensitive, these works are infused with Hicks’ characteristic wit, irony, pathos and dark humour.

The title of the exhibition refers to the eponymous sculpture at the centre of the show. Dressed for the Woods (2013) is about the fears of a mother releasing her children into the world, questioning whether she has prepared them adequately, and morning their loss and desperate to protect them, whilst filled with pride to see them grown to the point of independence. In Hick’s work, the bear is always a self-portrait, whether balancing on a rolling tire in the Dump Circus series (2021) or being led on a chain by an archetypal figure of undeserving authority in A Walk in the Park II (2009).

Every sculpture embodies a highly developed character – each heroic in their own way – and, together, they make up an immersive environment akin to a fairytale, surreal but tinged with the realities of contemporary life.