I would use the bursary to develop Touch Without Contact, a sculptural research project rooted in the natural phenomenon of crown shyness – where neighbouring tree canopies grow close but do not touch, creating distinct channels of negative space. This behaviour offers a compelling spatial metaphor for coexistence, restraint, and shared presence.
The funding would support the design, fabrication, and installation of a new sculptural series inspired by this phenomenon, exploring how proximity might be structured around attentiveness rather than enclosure. The work will involve modular sculptural components and site-responsive installations using sustainable materials such as reclaimed wood, metal, and rope – arranged in tension to suggest held distance.
The Dover Prize offers a vital opportunity to shift scale and deepen the technical ambitions of my practice, particularly in relation to engineered forms and public space. The bursary would enable material testing, model development, and collaboration with local fabricators and institutions. It would also provide crucial time and financial support to embed myself in a new context and develop work that responds to regional histories, landscapes, and architectural conditions.
My work often explores how natural systems might inform human-built environments – drawing from ecology, systems theory, and design ethics. This project will allow me to expand those concerns through site-specific experimentation. In parallel, I would research historic and contemporary approaches to urban green space and community-led infrastructure, considering how the ethics of non-encroachment might apply to civic development and cultural planning.
The bursary would not only enable the realisation of new work but also support long-term growth by seeding future commissions and partnerships. The project will be documented for exhibition and shared through public talks or workshops, contributing to a broader conversation about spatial justice, restraint, and ecological thinking in art.
This project will offer a sculptural and conceptual framework for thinking differently about space – in galleries, public settings, and shared environments across Darlington. Drawing from the quiet intelligence of trees and the geometries of restraint, Touch Without Contact invites local audiences to consider alternative ways of relating to one another and to the spaces they inhabit.
The work’s emphasis on ecological form and mutual responsiveness aligns with Darlington’s ambitions for community-centred regeneration and sustainable cultural development. It opens space for dialogue between contemporary sculpture, urban design, and environmental consciousness – themes particularly resonant in the North East’s evolving relationship to its post-industrial landscapes.
By embedding research and making processes locally, I aim to collaborate with regional practitioners, host workshops, and engage in public conversation around the themes of the work. The installation itself – whether in a gallery, garden, or civic space – will serve as a point of reflection and curiosity, contributing to a vibrant regional arts ecology.
This project is not only an artwork but an invitation – to see, to pause, and to imagine spatial ethics rooted in attentiveness rather than occupation. In doing so, it supports the Dover Prize’s aim of placing contemporary art at the heart of regional identity and renewal.
My practice spans sculpture, installation, and painting, focusing on how human interventions shape the natural world. I explore the intersection of technology and ecology, seeking ways for them to coexist rather than conflict. With a background in engineering, I work across industrial fabrication, digital-assisted manufacturing, and traditional processes such as lost-wax casting. I choose materials for their histories of use and reuse. Found and salvaged detritus contrast with organic elements, highlighting cycles of adaptation and regeneration. I am particularly interested in material agency – how metal oxidises, stone erodes, or salvaged elements retain past traces – creating meaning beyond my direct intervention. Allowing materials to assert their behaviours, I engage with their properties as active participants in shaping form, movement, and perception. In 2025, I received an institutional commission from neimënster (Luxembourg, LU) to create new work for the Graines exhibition. Using bitumen removed from Luxembourg’s roads, salvaged concrete and paving stones from Neumünster Abbey – and seeds – I developed Cracks of Potential, a series of site-specific sculptures and installations. The project examines how nature reclaims the built environment, breaking through fissures in asphalt and concrete. It highlights urbanisation’s impact while contrasting it with flora’s resilience in overlooked spaces. In 2024, I presented Ephemeral Structures, a series of computer-aided coil-built ceramics balancing geometric precision with organic forms as a means of introspection. For my RCA degree show, the installation Echoes of Extraction explored material life cycles and environmental impact. Selected Exhibitions 2025 Cracks of Potential as part of Graines, neimënster, Luxembourg (LU) 2024 198th RSA Annual Exhibition, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh
Echoes of Extraction, Royal College of Art, London
Now and Then, Dalkeith Palace, Dalkeith
Silk Road Artists Rendezvous, New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts, Wellington (NZ)
Elsewhere, Bermondsey Project Space, London
75th Annual Exhibition, Chelsea Art Society, London
Playground, The Handbag Factory, London
Interstitial, Safehouse, London
The Enigma of Consciousness, Art in the Docks Gallery, London
Terrain, Royal College of Art, London 2023 Silk Road Residency, Liangzhu Forum, Hangzhou (China)
Rooting our Cities, Botanical Garden of Palermo, Palermo (IT) 2022 SSA 130 Years, Society of Scottish Artists, Edinburgh
Brushes with Greatness, Private & Public Gallery, Jersey (C.I.)
Chemin, ArtHouse Jersey, Jersey (C.I.)
Do you have a degree in visual or applied arts at undergraduate and/or post-graduate level? Please provide details. (200 words)
2023 – 2024 MA Sculpture, Royal College of Art (RCA), London https://www.rca.ac.uk/study/programme-finder/sculpture-ma/
2023 – 2024 MA Sculpture, Royal College of Art (RCA), London
https://www.rca.ac.uk/study/programme-finder/sculpture-ma/
2023 Averil Picot Art Award, Société Jersiaise, Jersery (c.i.)
I was also a finalist for the prestigious Hyundai Award for Excellence in Sustainability and Creative Practice in 2024.
Yes, I am part of Koppel Project and take part in Open Days and exhibitions.
https://thekoppelproject.com/studios/heights
2025 Art That Grows Commission from neimënster, Neumünster Abbey, Luxembourg (LU)
This was a three-week residency as part of Graines, an exhibition of seed portraits by Thierry Ardouin, which led to “Cracks of Potential”, a new sculptural installation.
My interventions transform neimënster’s spaces with a poetic and unsettling dialogue between the built and the botanical. Repurposing bitumen removed from Luxembourg’s roads, salvaged concrete, and paving stones from neimënster itself, I introduced seeds and movement as active agents within the installation – suggesting both rupture and renewal.
London-based curator Beverley Harrison reviews the exhibition:
“Victor Guerin’s installation is a compelling dialogue between material decay and ecological renewal. By repurposing the very fabric of the city – bitumen, concrete, and stone – he invites us to consider how nature infiltrates and reclaims our constructed environments. As visitors move through the vaulted rooms of the Abbey, the works unfold in a subtle narrative: beginning with familiar moments of flora sprouting between stones, followed by a series of sculptures featuring dead leaves – evoking failed or suspended growth – before arriving at vigorous plant life breaking through layers of bitumen. The journey culminates in ‘Liminal’, a quietly ambiguous space framed by an arrangement of pavings: poised between promise and desolation, it remains open to interpretation. In dialogue with Thierry Ardouin’s seed portraits, Guerin’s sculptures and installations offer a transnational commentary on ecological resilience, where scent, form, and time converge to reflect on future regrowth. The very stones and soil of the Abbey become both medium and memory.”
I have two paintings held in the public collection of Hangzhou Liangzhu Archaeological Site (China). They decided to acquire my work following my residency there.
Residencies
2025 Art that grows, neimënster, Neumünster Abbey, Luxembourg (LU)
2025 Lock-In, ArtHouse Jersey, Jersey (C.I.)
2024. Festus, RCA X Sir John Soane’s Museum, London
2023 Silk Road Artist Rendezvous, Hangzhou Archaeological Site, Hangzhou (China)
Email: victorguerin.fr@pm.me
Address: KOPPEL Heights Studio 805, 101 Newington Causeway, London, SE1 6BN, GB
Local Authority: Southwark Council
