Receiving the £10,000 bursary would offer me a crucial foothold in the UK at a pivotal moment in my practice. After a year of working nomadically across landscapes in Borneo, Finland, Spain, and Indonesia—creating site-specific earth sculptures and ephemeral works with natural materials—I have returned to the UK with the intent to root my practice more deeply in the land and culture here. At present, I have no stable income or studio, and this award would allow me to begin rebuilding my base in the UK while continuing to evolve the raw, material-led work I’ve been developing internationally.
I would use the bursary to secure a modest studio space that enables me to store, experiment with, and sculpt earth materials. Having a home base would allow me to shift from itinerant practices into a more grounded, sustainable mode of working—one that still remains responsive to site but begins to develop long-term relationships with particular British landscapes.
The funds would also support field research, travel, and material sourcing within the UK, as I begin a new series of works exploring Britain’s layered ecologies and pre-industrial craft techniques through a contemporary sculptural lens. I hope to initiate collaborations with local ecologists, land stewards, and craftspeople, and begin filming process-based works that bridge sculpture and performance.
The Dover Prize represents an incredible opportunity for meaningful experimentation. I see it as a way to ground my practice without compromising its sensitivity or freedom. My goal is to build a body of work that speaks to both personal and planetary thresholds,a return to earth not as nostalgia, but as a way forward. This bursary would be the foundation that allows me to begin that journey here.
My practice centres on reconnecting the human body to the land through raw earth sculpture, performance, and film. If awarded the Dover Prize, I would use this opportunity to engage directly with Darlington’s surrounding landscapes creating new work that is rooted in place yet speaks to universal questions of belonging and ecological repair.
I hope to activate curiosity around natural materials and ancient processes, making space for the community to engage with sculpture not as static object, but as living, tactile practice. I believe Darlington’s rich heritage in engineering and craft presents a compelling backdrop for this kind of dialogue between the industrial and the elemental.
My aim would be to build relationships, linking local makers, ecologists, and residents in a shared, sustainable creative process. Through this, I hope to raise the profile of Darlington as a place where contemporary art emerges from the ground up, where earth is both subject and collaborator.
My practice explores the relationship between the human body and the natural world, using raw earth as both material and metaphor. Trained in sculpture and drawing, I now work across mediums including performance and film—treating sculpture as a tool to extend our perception through touch, instinct, and environment. My recent work, Earth Body, is a series of site-specific sculptures made from raw clay, sand, and natural pigments gathered from the landscape itself. These works are shaped by hand and by place. Over the past year, I’ve stepped away from the conventional studio to live and work nomadically across Finland, the UK, Spain, Bali, and Borneo. In each location, the land became both studio and collaborator. I lived alongside indigenous communities, drawing on traditional earth-building techniques such as adobe and rammed earth. These methods hold both sculptural potential and ecological wisdom. I’m interested in how these practices, when reinterpreted through a contemporary lens, can bridge the primitive and the digital, and invite new ways of thinking about sustainability, memory, and place. My current focus is on bringing these elemental processes into urban and gallery contexts to question where nature is allowed to exist within built environments. My sculptures often evoke the body—distorted, abstracted, half-submerged—emerging from or dissolving into their surroundings. In this way, the work becomes a site of return: a return to land, to slowness, and to a collective instinct buried beneath the surface of modern life. Recent exhibitions include group shows in the UK, Japan, Germany, France, Indonesia, Portugal, Finland, and Malaysia. I am currently developing a body of work for a solo presentation that merges film and earth sculpture, exploring the cycles of transformation, decay, and renewal. Through all of this, my aim is to offer work that is felt—bodily, materially, and emotionally—and to create spaces of connection between the built world and the deeper ecologies that support it.
Yes, I hold a BA (Hons) in Graphic Design Communication from Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, where I graduated with first-class honours and distinction.
Although my degree was in graphic design, my practice expanded beyond traditional boundaries incorporating sculpture, drawing, and installation from an early stage. During my time at Chelsea, I focused on spatial and tactile approaches to communication, often working three-dimensionally and with natural materials. This cross-disciplinary foundation laid the groundwork for my current practice, which operates between visual and applied arts—bridging sculpture, performance, earth-building, and time-based media.
Since graduating, I have continued to work independently, using international residencies, self-initiated projects, and site-based experiments as forms of ongoing postgraduate development. Much of my learning has happened outside formal institutions—through working with land, communities, and materials across varied terrains. In this sense, I treat the landscape itself as a post-academic space of study, one that challenges, informs, and reshapes the way I make and think.
I have not yet received a major professional grant or public arts award, which is why the Dover Prize would mark a significant milestone in my practice. Up to this point, my work has been largely self-initiated and independently sustained, supported by short-term commissions, residencies, and sales of sculpture and drawings.
That said, I have had the opportunity to participate in a number of international artist residencies and exhibitions, which have supported the development of my practice in informal but vital ways. These include residencies and site-based projects in Spain, Indonesia, Finland, and Malaysia, where I have worked closely with local communities and responded directly to the surrounding environment through sculpture and installation.
Rather than following a traditional institutional path, I’ve built my practice through risk-taking, experimentation, and direct engagement with the landscape. I now feel ready for the support and structure that a professional award like the Dover Prize would provide—offering the time, resources, and platform to deepen the scale and visibility of my work within the UK.
This would be my first opportunity to receive formal recognition for a body of work that has so far existed largely outside the framework of institutional funding.
Yes, much of my artistic journey has been shaped by self-created opportunities. Over the past few years, I’ve developed an itinerant, artist-led model of working that takes me directly into natural environments—transforming forests, riverbeds, mountains and coastal zones into temporary studios. Without a fixed space or institutional backing, I’ve had to carve out my own structure for making: organising residencies, sourcing materials on-site, and initiating collaborations with local craftspeople, ecologists, and communities.
This way of working has allowed me to retain creative freedom and maintain a close, unmediated relationship with my materials. At the same time, I am now seeking ways to evolve this model into a more sustainable and public-facing practice—one where artist-led still means responsive and independent, but with deeper roots and wider reach. The Dover Prize would support that transition.
While I have not yet received a formal commission from a public institution, many of my projects have been developed in partnership with independent cultural platforms and community organisations that serve public audiences. In 2025, I was selected to exhibit in On Reciprocity, a group exhibition hosted by Borneo Laboratory and Think & Tink in Kuching, which brought together interdisciplinary artists working in response to indigenous ecological knowledge. I have also participated in public-facing events such as Sensing Earth Space, a performance and film programme held at Titik Dua in Bali, and led community-engaged residencies with the Bidayuh Indigenous community in the Bengoh jungle, Sarawak.
At present, my artwork has not yet been acquired by a public collection. My work to date has primarily been exhibited through independent galleries, artist-led spaces, and international residencies, with pieces acquired by private collectors in Japan, the UK, and Indonesia.
That said, much of my recent practice has been time-based and site-specific—created in remote natural settings with raw materials such as earth, clay, and sand, often designed to slowly dissolve, erode, or remain in situ. As a result, the work often resists traditional models of acquisition. Instead, I’ve focused on developing alternative formats such as documentation, film, and cast fragments that translate these ephemeral works into more permanent forms, suitable for future archiving or collection.
One of my ambitions moving forward is to develop sculptural works that remain materially responsive and tactile, while also being appropriate for acquisition by public collections—particularly those with an interest in ecological practice, place-based work, and expanded sculpture. A public collection would offer a meaningful way for this type of practice to be preserved and shared more widely.
Yes, my work has been featured across several respected art, design, and culture publications. In 2012, Dazed profiled my early sculptural work, highlighting my exploration of geometric animal forms and the relationship between humans and nature. In 2014, GQ Spain named me “Hombre GQ de la Semana” following my collaboration with Ralph Lauren’s Denim & Supply line, showcasing my integration of art and fashion. British GQ featured a “20 Questions” interview in 2019, delving into my creative process and inspirations. That same year, British Vogue covered my role as BLOK London’s first artist-in-residence, discussing my installations that blend art with fitness spaces. More recently, in 2023, Designboom featured my “Invisible Figures” installation for YMC, highlighting the fusion of sculpture and fashion. In 2025, Huck Magazine published an in-depth interview focusing on my transition from skateboarding to creating earth-based sculptures, emphasizing my connection to natural materials and environments.
Yes, Arteles Residency Program in Finland.
Email: arrangregory@gmail.com
Address: 17 Minstrel Court, Teesdale Close, London, E2 6PQ, GB
Local Authority: London Borough of Tower Hamlets
