Tom Bull makes sculptures in an attempt to capture the lived experience within these dark, strange and untrustworthy times.
Through a landscape of folk, rural living, modernity and ritual, he investigates the tension and slippage between fiction and representation, violence and sensitivity, truth and mythology. With a wide range of tools and materials borrowed from architecture, model making, carpentry, farming and forestry, he employs a sculptural practice that confronts and manipulates traditions, time periods, lore and genre. His recent work interrogates “country life” by challenging personal and collective issues around land, loss, community, wealth, access, labour and violence.
For Precarious we show two works, entitled And All That Haunted Nigh Had Sought Their Household Fires (2022) and Weary Traveller (2023). Sited in close proximity, a sense of foreboding overwhelms any familiar images of the cosy fire at the heart of a rural idyllic home we might harbour. While the stool invites us to pause on and rest for a while, its blackened state and the absence of heat negates any invitations of respite and restoration.
Tom Bull lives and works in London. He has exhibited widely, including To Whom do you Trust the Spare Keys at Airspace, Stoke on Trent (2019) Groundwork at Studio West, London (2022) and New Contemporaries, touring (2022-2023).
