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My name is Nigel Ten Fleming. The “Ten” came from my marriage to my wife, Tessa ten Tusscher. It made up for my inexplicable lack of a middle name. When I told my sister my new name, she paused for a long while, and then said “one is enough!” She was probably right.
But in my case, I do need 10 more lives. I have a list of planned sculptural projects that would challenge the fabled longevity of a cat. So, in my remaining years, I want to work, work, work! And that work, with all its dust and mess, I absolutely love.
I became a sculptor quite out of the blue without ever having wished to become one. Purely by chance, on a holiday in Prague, I came across a life-sized sculpture of a woman with a horse’s head stooping over her own entrails. It had such an impact on me that the next day I had fully resolved to drop everything else and train myself as a sculptor. It was not obviously beautiful, but it was hugely evocative and drove me to ask myself if I was prepared to make a huge change in my life and learn to sculpt. The answer was a resounding “yes”! Taking on this new challenge during the later part of my life has been personally transforming. After a busy career as a clinical biochemist and entrepreneur, I feel driven to create stone sculptures that offer a visual path into the wonders of the natural world.
My theme is NATURE WRIT LARGE. Little things we cannot see taken out of scale and context to be seen afresh. It is that simple. My first first big piece was a 9 cubic meter multimedia representation of the head of a virus.
My sculptural work is primarily designed to develop the ideas about which I am writing and reading. It is an internal dialogue with myself as the primary audience. Through informing the physical image with rigorous science, I continue to refine my thinking. This interplay of ideas, science and art drives my work.
As my work has progressed, it has became increasingly conceptual. I’m interested in capturing complex ideas with a single visual image, fully convinced that an image can convey a thousand words.
Aesthetically pretty images alone do little for me – the image must contain meaning. Just as science is an inquiry into reality, so then is art. It is this synthesis of personal reinterpretation and scientific research boiled into a single image that really excites me.
Sculpting, my private writings on the subject, my scientific readings, and my dream work all coalesce and lead to the pieces that I want to share with you.
While my passion is to work with geologically ancient and beautiful stone, some larger pieces are multimedia. Soon, I plan to work on larger scale stone projects in a modular fashion so that the sheer logistics of handling heavy stones can be manageable in my workshop.
This website is a virtual exhibit of my sculptural work and each sculpture links to a brief essay on the subject. Through this interplay of science and art, I hope to offer a window into the wonders of the natural world. If you would like to see more of my scientific musings, please follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Thank you, and enjoy. I will respond to all messages to this site and hope we can build a dialogue. So please feel free to contact me.
