Tom Bull (b. 1995) is a British artist making sculptures and video installations in an absurd attempt to capture the lived experience within dark, strange and untrustworthy times. He completed his Foundation of Fine Art at Northampton University (2015). He completed his BA (Hons) in Fine Art At Central Saint Martins (2018) and his MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths (2022).
Through the landscape of folklore, urbanisation and rituals, Bull investigates the tension and slippage between fiction and representation, violence and sensitivity, truth and mythology. With a wide range of tools and materials borrowed from architecture, model making, craft, aspirational design, preservation, farming and forestry, Bull employs a sculptural practice that confronts and manipulates traditions, time periods, lore and genre. His most recent works interrogate “country life” by challenging issues around land, loss, community, wealth, nostalgia, access, labour and violence. These sculptures are nuanced and complex, not just imitating life but working within it, for they do not seek answers to life’s ambiguities; instead they highlight them as well as their resultant anxieties, playing with them as a visual medium, giving them form and presence.
He has received multiple awards including the London Bronze Casting Fellowship (2023), the Hari Graduate Art Prize (2022), selected by Gavin Turk, Liz Gilmore, Matthew Burrows, and Aindrea Emelife, the Visions in the Nunnery (2022), selected by Patrick Goddard and the Gilbert Bayes Award from the Royal Society of Sculptors (2022). He was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2022. In 2021, He was awarded the Goldsmiths tuition fee waiver for academic excellence during his Masters and the Thomas Scholarship from UCL. He undertook the Associate Studio Programme, a three-year residency at Acme Studios from 2019, and the Sugden Arts Fellowship in 2018.
He has presented two solo exhibitions; ‘Under Cover of Darkness’ at E-Werk in Freiburg (2023) and ‘To Whom Do You Trust with the Spare Keys' at Airspace Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent (2019). Recent group exhibitions include: ‘All the world’s a stage’ at Sherbert Gallery in London (2024); ‘Alchemical Landscape’ at Cob Gallery in London (2024); ‘Untitled’ at Artvisor in London (2023); ‘Shallow Haunts’ at Kupfer in London (2024); ‘La Caverna una Casa’ at General Expenses in Mexico City (2023); ‘Disagreements as Domains of Nausea and Elation’ at the Austrian Cultural Forum in London (2023); ‘The Other Side of Paradise’ at The Bomb Factory in London (2023); ‘Precarious’ at Art Exchange in Essex (2023) ;‘Will-o'-the-wisp at Des Bains in Turin (2022); New Contemporaries at Ferens Gallery in Hull (2022).