Uploaded August 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
'Seeing them, you are struck first by wonder and then by mystery' Robert Macfarlane
goldmarkart.com
There are few artists working with the kind of intense and profound reverence for their materials as Richard James. A rescuer of once-living things, his extraordinary handmade reliquaries, assembled with astounding complexity, have won him the admiration of poets, critics, fellow artists and even Astronomers Royal.
For connection is what connects these works: there in the fine lines of taut-drawn horsehair that join the individual elements, there in the lattice of preoccupations to which the cabinets return, there in the sky-maps and the sea-charts and the transistors, and there in the oblique ecology that suffuses Richard’s vision – the first law of ecology being that ‘everything is connected to everything else’... it is clear to me that Richard’s assemblage-art, in all its archly enigmatic energies, shares with Deleuze a sense of the world’s strange and thrilling vibrancy.' Robert Macfarlane
Richard James was born in 1963 in Northampton. He has works in private collections all over the UK and US. Much of his work makes strong use of astronomical association: an attempt to recognise the greater mystery inherent in the commonplace remnants of exhausted life. He strives to offer glimpses of the unknown, to uncover fragments of hidden mystery and explore the subliminal landscape concealed by the everyday.
Seeing them, you are struck first by wonder and then by mystery, Robert Macfarlane
There are few artists working with the kind of intense and profound reverence for their materials as Richard James. A rescuer of once-living things, his extraordinary handmade reliquaries, assembled with astounding complexity, have won him the admiration of poets, critics, fellow artists and even Astronomers Royal.
'Seeing them, you are struck first by wonder and then by mystery' Robert Macfarlane
goldmarkart.com
There are few artists working with the kind of intense and profound reverence for their materials as Richard James. A rescuer of once-living things, his extraordinary handmade reliquaries, assembled with astounding complexity, have won him the admiration of poets, critics, fellow artists and even Astronomers Royal.
For connection is what connects these works: there in the fine lines of taut-drawn horsehair that join the individual elements, there in the lattice of preoccupations to which the cabinets return, there in the sky-maps and the sea-charts and the transistors, and there in the oblique ecology that suffuses Richard’s vision – the first law of ecology being that ‘everything is connected to everything else’... it is clear to me that Richard’s assemblage-art, in all its archly enigmatic energies, shares with Deleuze a sense of the world’s strange and thrilling vibrancy.' Robert Macfarlane
Richard James was born in 1963 in Northampton. He has works in private collections all over the UK and US. Much of his work makes strong use of astronomical association: an attempt to recognise the greater mystery inherent in the commonplace remnants of exhausted life. He strives to offer glimpses of the unknown, to uncover fragments of hidden mystery and explore the subliminal landscape concealed by the everyday.
Seeing them, you are struck first by wonder and then by mystery, Robert Macfarlane
There are few artists working with the kind of intense and profound reverence for their materials as Richard James. A rescuer of once-living things, his extraordinary handmade reliquaries, assembled with astounding complexity, have won him the admiration of poets, critics, fellow artists and even Astronomers Royal.
