Richard Dean Hughes (b.1987, Manchester, UK) is an artist based in Manchester, known for his exploration of the slippery relationship between reality and the realm of the hypothetical. Hughes often revisits and describes a personal and internal space, taking artifacts, feelings and ‘visuals’ from imagined scenarios, bringing them into real time through the manipulation of material and collisional objects. His sculptures question the idea of plausibility, they question their own existence, acting as a representational display of the space in which Hughes is trying to describe.

Suggestion and the idea of plausibility is central to Hughes’s practice, repeated motifs and a collisional approach create unordinary but persuasive coalescence. He theoretically and conceptually slices up the time-based elements of an object, then hypothetically stitches them back together; treating the concept and history of an object as something that can be manipulated to create a new scenario, extract meaning and tell a new story.

Hughes incorporates a wide range of traditional processes alongside new technologies, and an ever-growing array of materials from resin, metal and paint to dust and newspaper. Using small tools to carve certain works, then stereo-lithography to produce others; like his work, Hughes shifts and morphs, reacting to the concept, and the language of generated ideas. Hughes is able to draw from his material repertoire to continue an exploration of duality, the materiality and concepts of his work belong in two places at one time, can be 2 things at the same time; both hot and cold, utilitarian and absurd. 

His recent exhibitions include things fall apart; the centre cannot hold, Tabula Rasa Gallery (London, 2023); Ubiquitous no.14, Tube Gallery (Palma, 2023); Centre Of the Periphery, Pipeline Gallery (London, 2023); Everything at Once, Generation and display (duo show, London, 2022); Subliminal Thaw, Night Time Story (online, solo, Los Angeles, 2021); Off Trail, Air Gallery (Manchester,2021); Vent, 9A Gallery (duo, Todmorden Yorkshire, 2021); Soft Display, Division Of Labour (Worcester, 2020); When Shit Hit’s The Fan, Guts Gallery (online, London, 2020).

Tabula Rasa Gallery

Manchester