South African artist Nic Bladen is 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, Bladen 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, Bladen 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 moulds from actual organic material, and then transforming these into once-off sculptures of entire plants.

Bladen’s first solo exhibition, Peninsula, held at Everard Read, Cape Town in 2013, focused on the richness of botanical diversity that surrounds the artist's Simon’s 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 landowners on the peninsula enabled Bladen to harvest such rarities as a Blue disa and the endemic Serruria villosa, amongst others.

In 2015, Bladen worked as an 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.

Several solo exhibitions at the Everard Read galleries both in South Africa and London have followed since, looking primarily at the spectacular and diverse plant families of the Western Cape.

Bladen’s unique works can be found in the Standard Bank Art Collection, Ellerman House Cape Town, BMW and Oppenheimer Collections, as well as in many other prestigious private collections, both locally and abroad.

 
SOLO EXHIBITIONS