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Richard Dean Hughes

British artist Richard Dean Hughes examines the relationship between the real and the hypothetical. He takes objects, feelings, and visuals from imagined scenarios and brings them into reality by manipulating material and collisional objects. At its core, his sculptures challenge the idea of plausibility and act as a representation of the space that Hughes tries to depict.

Suggestion and plausibility are fundamental to his practice. Richard Dean Hughes slices up the time-based elements of an object and then hypothetically stitches them back together. Thus he treats the concept and history of an object as something that can be manipulated. He creates new scenarios and extracts meanings to tell a new story.

To achieve this, Richard Dean Hughes employs traditional processes alongside modern technologies. Besides, his artistic vocabulary contains an ever-growing array of materials such as resin, metal, paint, dust, and newspaper. And just like his work, Hughes shifts and morphs, reacting to the concept and the language of generated ideas.

Richard Dean Hughes draws from his material repertoire to explore duality. His materiality and concepts exist in two places simultaneously, embodying both hot and cold, utilitarian and absurd. Hughes’s sculptures are a testament to the power of suggestion and the idea that a single object can be manipulated to create entirely new narratives.

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