Why It Matters
Deshayes’ practice bridges art and industrial manufacturing, highlighting how contemporary sculpture can engage with materiality, labor, and the invisible infrastructures of both bodies and cities. For artists, designers, and audiences, the conversation offers insight into sustainable, collaborative production methods and the evolving dialogue between public art and everyday objects.
Key Takeaways
- •Deshayes uses vacuum‑formed plastics to mimic skin‑like membranes.
- •His sculptures reference human circulatory systems and hidden bodily structures.
- •He collaborates with factories for aluminium, cast iron, radiator pieces.
- •Installations integrate water, echoing Thames infrastructure and public fountains.
- •Early Shoreditch shows tied his work to London gallery scene.
Pulse Analysis
Nicolas Deshayes emerged from the early 2010s Shoreditch surge, showing alongside Jonathan Viner and other young London galleries. A Royal College of Art graduate, he gravitated toward vacuum‑forming—a technique borrowed from design studios—to create skin‑like membranes that echo Zaha Hadid’s parametric aesthetics. Early works such as "Bubbles Underfoot" combined octopus forms with polyurethane foam, establishing a tactile dialogue between sculpture and industrial processes. This blend of art and engineering set the tone for his career, positioning him as a bridge between experimental design and contemporary sculpture.
Deshayes’s practice revolves around the hidden anatomy of bodies and cities. He translates veins, arteries, and intestinal motifs into aluminium, cast iron, and polystyrene installations that often incorporate flowing water. Projects like the Battersea Park Pump House fountain and the Thames‑water‑driven sculptures embed plumbing within sculptural forms, turning public infrastructure into immersive art. By sourcing radiators from the Midlands and casting in historic foundries, he treats factories as extensions of his studio, emphasizing the sensual heat of industrial processes while commenting on urban circulatory systems.
The artist’s material rigor resonates beyond the gallery, influencing public art discourse and offering a model for collaborative manufacturing. Inspired by pioneers such as Philida Barlow, Deshayes balances heavyweight industrial techniques with an apparently lightweight aesthetic, challenging notions of permanence and sustainability. For business leaders, his work illustrates how cross‑sector partnerships—between artists, manufacturers, and civic bodies—can generate innovative, site‑specific experiences that enrich cultural capital while showcasing material expertise. As cities seek to revitalize public spaces, Deshayes’s water‑driven installations demonstrate the commercial and social value of integrating art, engineering, and environmental narratives.
Episode Description
Talk Art Season 27 continues with sculptor Nicolas Deshayes whose works explore the form and materiality of bodies and what happens below their surfaces. Hosted by Robert Diament.
Process, or processing, is the impetus for Deshayes’ sculptures, which manage to convey states of liquid, hardness, hot, cold, and mechanically produced objects and systems. Vital processes of ingestion, and circulation, are evoked by elegantly utilitarian forms. Deshayes’ surfaces are consistently impermeable – recalling the architecture of public amenities.
Using predominantly casting methods with bronze, iron, or earthenware, Deshayes tends to seek out artisans and factories who specialise in techniques of production; their historical lineages and geographical particularities converging within his conceptualisation of the work as it develops.
Extreme heat is used in these casting processes commonly and the materials rely on changes in temperature in order to come alive. But molten metal rapidly hardens into a solid form, its movement as if suspended in time. Deshayes has recently rendered some of these sculptures functional again, plumbing hot water around a room, or pumping water into public ponds.
In his 2016 installation Thames Water, he recast the gallery as an organism by installing a series of interconnected radiators, in doing so concretising an analogy of the body and its systems to the plumbed and networked city. It is in these works that we are reminded of how their organic forms are not only reminiscent of the bodies of humans, but also of domestic, civic and biological circulatory systems.
Nicolas Deshayes was born in Nancy, France, in 1983, and lives and works in Dover.
Follow: @NicolasDeshayes
Pillow Talk, a joint exhibition with Nicolas Deshayes & Paloma Proudfoot, runs at @QuenchGallery in Margate until 22nd March 2026.
Thanks to Stuart Shave Modern Art. Learn more: https://www.modernart.net/en/artists/nicolas-deshayes
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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