Friday 7 March 2025, from 6pm

Join us for the preview evening and first time viewing of Nicola Hicks ‘ ‘Dressed for the Woods’. The show includes a new series of sculptures and works on paper created especially for the exhibition.

The exhibition is the first solo retrospective of Nicola Hicks MBE FRSS, one of the most important British sculptors of the 21st century. In celebration of the artist’s 65th birthday, the gallery will present more than 30 exceptional artworks, drawn from each major series of Hicks’ remarkable 40-year career. The magnificent 13th century tithe barn at Messums West will be the setting for this visual journey into Hicks’ extraordinary mind, in which the viewer will encounter creatures, great and small – some anthropomorphic, some metamorphic – in the form of intensely beautiful sculptures infused with pathos, irony and the artist’s dark humour.

The works on show, dating from the 1990s to the present day explore human and animal relationships, family dynamics, complex states of mind, and the nature of love, morality, greed and corruption. Each highly developed character is heroic in their own way and, together, they make up an environment akin to immersion in a fairytale, tinged with the realities of contemporary life.

Almost all of the sculptures on show will be in their original plaster state (though all are able to be cast in a bronze edition). Hicks describes these as ‘plaster sketches’. Created through a fluid and organic process of building up form in plaster and straw on a metal armature, they are raw, instinctual, fragile and overwhelmingly sensitive.