• Hornby's practice divides into several bodies of works:

     

    Intersections
    Extrusions
    Hydrographics
    Collaboraitons
    Public Art 

  • Socially engaged Hornby's interest in creating large-scale sculptures had been developing, and two significant projects in 2009 served as catalysts...

    Socially engaged

     

    Hornby's interest in creating large-scale sculptures had been developing, and two significant projects in 2009 served as catalysts for furthering his work. The first was a commission called 'Visual Dialogues' for the Tate Triennial, and the second was an invitation from the Southbank Centre related to the exhibition 'Walking in My Mind' at the Hayward Gallery. These projects involved Hornby collaborating with young people to create art and promote engagement with the exhibits. During the Southbank Centre project, Hornby sought to create a sculpture that would give equal presence to all participants' contributions. To achieve this democratic approach, Hornby used software he had been working with to transform their two-dimensional drawings into three-dimensional forms, which he incorporated into a single, imposing sculpture around a central axis. The sculpture allowed for each participant's creative contributions to be viewed from different positions around the sculpture, marking the inception of Hornby's 'intersection' works.

  • Atom vs Super Subject, 2010 Upon his first solo exhibition at Alexia Goethe Gallery on London’s Dover Street, titled ‘Atom...

    Atom vs Super Subject, 2010

     

    Upon his first solo exhibition at Alexia Goethe Gallery on London’s Dover Street, titled ‘Atom vs Super Subject’, the following year, Hornby had already gained a significant press following from both mainstream and specialist art media, which has continued to this day. The primary reason for this attention was Hornby’s development of intersection works, which involve selecting elements from sculptures by notable historical artists and using computer-aided design and manufacture to create hybrids in materials such as metal, wood, resin, or marble. Some sources are easily identifiable, while others become apparent as the observer moves around the sculpture. Curators, commentators, and collectors swiftly understood the significance of Hornby’s approach to sculpture, as he found a way to connect the history of the medium with a thoroughly modern approach. Hornby’s work is made possible only by digital technology, yet it can embrace past periods or styles while simultaneously creating an entirely new sculptural language. The formal, aesthetic, and critical implications of this approach are significant, with endless permutations. Some argue that Hornby has initiated a new mode of sculptural production for the twenty-first century. The artist also applied similar principles to Victorian portrait busts from the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, creating hybrids of different figures within a single sculpture. These works, which he describes as ‘meta-cubist busts,’ exude a modernist vibe of the distant future while quietly revealing their distinguished nineteenth-century origins from specific angles.

  • Extrusions This body of work started when Hornby was shortlisted for a commission to make a permanent sculpture for the...

    Extrusions 

     

    This body of work started when Hornby was shortlisted for a commission to make
    a permanent sculpture for the cast courts at the V&A in London. His design was for a twelve-metre long ‘stalactite’ formed by taking the outline of Michelangelo’s     David and extruding it to a single point. While he did not win the commission, the research that went into the project would go on to form the basis of Hornby’s solo exhibition Nick Hornby: Sculpture (1504–2013) at Churner and Churner in New York and the concurrent public commission: God Bird Drone, also presented in New York in 2013.

    The basic principle of this ongoing body of works is a single silhouette extruded and then an action performed, such as reduction to a point, twisting, enlarging and so on. Unlike the Intersection works, the Extrusions to date have involved no combining of sources, only simple manipulations of a single source. As with other bodies of Hornby’s work, digital technology plays a significant role in his design and production processes for the Extrusions.

    Subsequent Extrusion pieces include a console table for David Gill Gallery, London, and a number have been exhibited at Glyndebourne. A selection of sculptures that form part of the ongoing body of Extrusions works is illustrated in the following pages.

  • Hydrographics This body of work was initiated for a solo show at MOSTYN Gallery, Wales, titled Zygotes and Confessions, which...

    Hydrographics

     

    This body of work was initiated for a solo show at MOSTYN Gallery, Wales, titled Zygotes and Confessions, which opened in November 2020. It marked a significant turning point in Hornby’s practice, whereby, following a decade in which he had explored ideas relating to the removal of authorship (and himself) from the work, he produced a body of work which was extremely personal in nature. This conceptual shift was marked by the arrival of a new process in his practice, namely that of dipping sculptures into liquefied images – the Hydrographic works were born.

     

    The first body of Hydrographic works was started during lockdown, in the month Hornby turned forty. ‘It was also the month I split up with a long-term partner, commemorated the ten-year anniversary of my mother’s death, and the month my father forgot who I was – he has Alzheimer’s.’ With this series, Hornby decided, for the first time, to explore his personal identity using intimate and autobiographical narratives.

     

    Since the Zygotes and Confessions exhibition, Hornby has been exploring new directions and ideas with this process.

  • Collaborations Collaboration, in different forms, is integral to Hornby’s practice. As has been noted, his first major body of work,...

    Collaborations

     

    Collaboration, in different forms, is integral to Hornby’s practice. As has been noted, his first major body of work, the Intersections, grew out of a genuine attempt to collaborate with a group of young people for a commission for the Southbank Centre. The result was a single object mathematically and evenly designed by six people. Hornby’s presence

    as an artist was in the final composite form, simultaneously demonstrating the artist’s role as producer, orchestrator, architect, curator, facilitator and collaborator.

     

    Hornby considers his inclusion of works from art history to be an act of collaboration as much as appropriation. Collaboration is a form of dialogue – a two-way process in which the sharing of ideas creates something new that perhaps neither party would have con- ceived or produced on their own. Sculpture, as Hornby is keen to point out, is ‘inherently and historically collaborative’, the artist working closely with foundries, technicians, engineers and many other specialists in the daily production of his work.

     

    Hornby has also actively sought out collaborations with fellow living artists. ‘If my practice conceptually engages with authorship,’ he says, ‘then co-authorship with another artist
    is a way to make visible that dialogue.’ The two most significant collaborations Hornby has undertaken to date have been with painter Sinta Tantra and photographer Louie Banks. In both cases the collaborators embraced the possibilities of wrapping images around objects, investigating how allusions to pictorial depth relate to objecthood.

  • Public Commissions and Beyond British sculptor Nick Hornby has made public artworks before, but none for sites as prominent as...

    Public Commissions and Beyond

    British sculptor Nick Hornby has made public artworks before, but none for sites as prominent as those that will, through 2023, become home to three, site-specific pieces by the artist, in London’s Kensington and Westminster.

     

    A monumental horse and rider on a 7m high plinth, Power over others is Weakness disguised as Strength, will become the centrepiece of one of London’s widest pedestrianised streets, Orchard Place in Westminster, outside St James’ Park underground station, to be opened-up to the public for the first time with the inauguration of this work in February 2023. 

     

    Do It All, a hefty 3.5m high, 4 tonne bronze that references both Nefertiti and The Albert Memorial, will be installed on the site of the former faux-Egyptian Homebase in Kensington in (June) 2023; whilst Here & There, for the nearby Canning Passage, will bring a more human scale figure, standing just over 3m high on its plinth, to this pedestrian through-route, scheduled for installation (November) 2023. 

     

    The works are fabricated in the traditional media of public statuary – steel and bronze - but their appearance is far from traditional: “If anything, they are ‘pre-toppled’”, says Hornby, referencing the 2021 toppling of the monument to slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, that started a wave of activism around the country.   “My position as an artist has always been to acknowledge the voices and perspectives of others.  It’s part of my identity as a gay man – to accept and be accepted.  So, I’m taking the classical forms of public statuary, like the horse and rider, and flipping them - literally twisting the metal so that you see multiple forms from different angles.” 

     

    It was early commissioned collaborations with students at Tate Britain and the Southbank that kick-started the idea of multi-perspectival work – as Hornby tried to amalgamate all the contributions from the workshops into one monumental, finished piece.  The importance of being able to show and validate multiple positions has stayed with him: hybrid is his touchstone, as he digitally folds silhouettes that quote from art history to create works that assume different shapes as one moves around them.

     

    Well aware that he is dealing with politically-charged territory, Hornby provocatively places an equestrian statue on a plinth for the Westminster commission.  The form of Richard I, with the Houses of Parliament as its backdrop, is rolled into the ineffable, ribbon-like hand-drawn line from the novel Tristram Shandy, reducing the warlike power of the triumphant monarch and rendering the otherwise mighty, six-tonne statue, into a less stable image.  From one view you see a traditional horse and rider; from all other angles, the image collapses into an abstract shape, making multiple senses of the title Power over others is Weakness disguised as Strength.

     

     

    Drawing, rather, on local history and culture, Do It All – the name being a deliberate mix-up with the 1980s DIY chain – references the multiple readings of this sculpture: from one angle, it is the profile of Nefertiti, a nod to the extraordinary Egyptian-revival Homebase that used to stand on the site and to former Kensington resident Howard Carter; from another angle, the silhouette of the nearby Albert Memorial appears, a tribute to Kensington’s George Gilbert Scott.  Hornby enjoys the playful inversion of history that he is able to create: archaeologist Carter excavated the tomb of Tutankhamen, whilst this is a site where an Egyptian-revival building was levelled and buried.  

     

    “The compound of 1330BC, 1872 and 2023 is weird and beautiful—sci-fi, but relic too. That hybrid appearance captures the slipperiness of the histories these images, and monuments more generally. What interests me is the question of how we relate to these things today: they are present and familiar, but their meanings are forever shifting.”

     

    The third work, Here and There, again references Hornby’s fascination with multiple viewpoints and interpretations.  Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog – anticipating pedestrians’ experience of encountering this human scale work as they navigate the city - is alternately concealed and revealed as one moves around the sculpture, woven through with Hornby’s repeated motif of Tristram Shandy’s curling line.  

     

    “Laurence Sterne is a continual source of inspiration for me; hence paying homage to his heroic challenging of convention in two of these commissioned works. His break with tradition in the 19th century was so radical: no one in the literary world has ever managed to top that.  I’m having a go at it now, by deconstructing sculpture in the heart of the establishment.  For me, this opportunity is about as exciting as it gets.”