NICHOLAS SHUREY

Sculpture is not an esoteric art form in the hands of sculptor Nicholas Shurey, rather it is playful and tactile that people want to reach out and engage with. “Sculpture should arrest a viewer beyond being visually stimulating - it should elicit sensations, emotions, or memories too,” says the British born Shurey, who trained as an architect at The Royal Danish Academy and worked as a designer before devoting himself to his sculptural practice.

Shurey typically works with undried green logs mostly sourced from trees that have to be felled around Copenhagen. Carving the pieces by hand himself Shurey says his works exist as furniture, art objects and sculptures, thereby circumventing any pretense of preciousness and letting people engage with the pieces haptically, in the same way he does as he makes them. “All of my pieces have a sense of humanness that appeals to our need to recognise ourselves within our environments,” he says, adding that the red thread or recurring element is a “simplicity of line work; continuous, oscillating arcs and curves that create masses separated by moments of compressions.”

Double Helix Form and Untitled, the two pieces he is presenting in Ark Kollekt 01 were two big chunks of log, he says, the latter being what he calls, a maple tree, reshaped.