Biography
Nic Bladen
South African artist Nic Bladen has become known for his extraordinary botanical sculptures, which demonstrate the technique he pioneered of casting entire plants in bronze and sterling silver. Born in 1974 in Pretoria, Nic trained in the field of dental technology, a discipline that requires incredible precision and attention to detail. After working for eight years making gold and porcelain crowns in various dental laboratories in South Africa and the UK, Nic developed an interest in sculpture and began working at the Bronze Age Foundry, learning large scale bronze casting as well as all aspects of metalwork. Knowledge of the two seemingly different fields of dental technology and bronze casting precipitated Bladen's experimentations in 2001: casting flowers and leaves. In marrying the micro and macro disciplines, he pioneered a way of developing perfect castings of organic matter. His way of preserving/fossilizing plants and flowers involves a method known as 'lost wax casting', or 'cire perdue', and it involves creating molds from actual organic material, and then transforming these into once-off sculptures of entire plants.
Nic's first solo exhibition, 'Peninsula', held at Everard Read Gallery Cape Town in 2013, focused on the richness of botanical diversity that surrounds the artist's Simons Town studio, which is situated within the heart of the Cape Floral Kingdom, the smallest yet richest of the world's six Floral Kingdoms. For this show, concessions from land-owners on the peninsula enabled Bladen to harvest such rarities as a Blue disa and the endemic Serruria villasa, amongst others.
In 2015, Nic worked as Artist in Residence at Tswalu Kalahari, a private game reserve in South Africa's Northern Cape Province. The sculptures that he created during this time, a depiction of iconic, beautiful and strange Kalahari desert plants and trees, formed his second solo exhibition: 'Kalahari: a season at Tswalu' held at Everard Read Johannesburg in October 2015.
The title of Nic’s third solo exhibition, held at Everard Read & Circa (Johannesburg) in late 2017, is attributed to William J. Burchell, one of the ‘immortals’ of Cape botany, in about 1810. Referencing the floral abundance and diversity encountered even during severe drought, Nic’s latest body of work depicts the tenacity of Cape flora to tolerate this dryness and the splendour with which it does so.
Nic’s fourth solo exhibition, ‘Botanical Studies in Bronze and Silver’ was held at Everard Read London in April/May 2018, introducing his unique cast botanicals to a whole new audience, to great acclaim.
In January 2020, Nic held his fourth solo exhibition, ‘Proteaceae’ at Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town. This body of work focused on this spectacular and diverse plant family, of which there are approximately 360 species in South Africa. Nic was able to cast about 10% of these, portraying seven of the fourteen genera, represented by thirty species. This seminal exhibition was accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue, which records the habitats, distribution and conservation status of each bronze plant casting.
In February 2021, Nic exhibits ‘Botanical Studies in Bronze and Silver II’ at Everard Read Gallery, London, his second solo show in London. This body of diverse Fynbos highlights some exquisite flowering plants found on the Cape Peninsula. Unique to this show are the heights of some of the more delicate flowering plants which have been cast, including a 1,5 meter high Agapanthus and an almost 2 meter high Watsonia.