From his skating past to sculpting present, Arran Gregory revels in the organic

“I think my work is an inquiry into understanding a deeper self,” says London-based multi-disciplinary visual artist, and skateboarder, Arran Gregory during our WhatsApp call, him nearly eight thousand miles away in Bali. “This idea of exploring where we come from, how we suddenly got here, and connecting the dots between the two.”

Gregory's statement is one that has remained relevant throughout his creative practice. From beginnings over a decade ago, working alongside PWBC member James Edson to co-found Wayward Gallery, designing the Long Live Southbank campaign logo, and inking iconic designs for world-renowned brand Slam City Skates – a ubiquitous sight among a generation of skate rats and Southbank devotees alike, and bringing the apex predators of the natural world to life in the form of life-sized mirror sculptures, to his most recent works: hand-moulded visages crafted in the Indonesian jungle, working beneath and against the heavens, making pure and unpretentious art.

Since then, Gregory has steered his practice towards something altogether alluring, alien, and hard to ignore: varnished wood blocks carved out to form brooding, primitive human skulls; bolshy cement blocks, shaped and arranged into herculean figures, frozen in dramatic poses. His materials have become wholly organic. His themes; more anthropological, contemplative and introspective. His studio; outdoors, boundless and full of vulnerability. Within his work now lies a path towards an unravelling Homo Sapiens’ shrouded lineage, across past, present and future.

To hear about his latest exhibition, Sensing Earth Space, taking place in Titik Dua, Bali during a six-month journey across Southeast Asia, I spoke to him about his artistic descent into both humanness and the existential.

The evolution of your practice in terms of medium, firstly from illustrations to sculpting, working with styrofoam, to jesmonite and then your mirror sculptures – later, to wood, concrete, and now both raw earth and clay, has been a gradual, and yet radical one. One consistency throughout, however, has been the use of animals as subjects. What is it about animals that has kept you bound to them creatively, for all this time?

Arran Gregory: That’s a really good question, because that’s the centre of why I create – this question of: ‘Who are we as animals?’ I find that through observing nature, I can learn about myself and the world, and thus, use animals as characters to explore the self. In the beginning, the animals like the Bear Safe illustration that I did for Slam City Skates, were simply illustrations that people could wear and express parts of themselves. In time, I realised how much people resonated with certain animals, like the bear, in a personal way. For example, there's an interesting story, where one of the Slam City Skates owners was at Glastonbury and knew Colin Greenwood from Radiohead. When Colin saw his Bear Safe t-shirt design that I’d drawn, he asked him for one and wore it during a secret set that they were scheduled to play. Colin said that he wanted to wear it because he gets nervous on stage, and wearing it would make him feel more confident. Firstly, I was honoured that Radiohead’s bassist was wearing my t-shirt on stage, but I also liked the fact that it captured how I felt in terms of how we learn about ourselves and can identify with animals in powerful ways.

So the animals within your works, almost serve as totems?

AG: Exactly. I think the question of our relationship with nature is something that I’m forever exploring, because there are so many ways of seeing it. There’s this idea that we’re separate from nature – that we’re humans and they’re animals, and I think therein lies the confusion of why we’ve become so detached from a thing that is essentially, from a totality that we are also a part of. Within the idea of separation, I personally feel that we’re dislocating ourselves from the world, and we’re starting to believe so much more in these human narratives, be it the commercial world, capitalist societies, or the internet – our technology.

Towards the start of your career, skateboarding seemed to play a focal part in your life, through your links to both PWBC and Slam City Skates, as well as being a skateboarder in your own right. What was the scene like back then in those early days in the ’00s? Was skateboarding an active influence on you as an artist at all?

AG: Yeah, I used to go to Cantelowes skatepark quite a lot, and South Bank too every day while I was at university. Back then, the Hold Tight London edits (filmed by Hold Tight Henry a.k.a. Henry Edwards-Wood) were being filmed – he was a huge part of documenting the scene, with each edit coming out like every few months. Slam City Skates were a big part of the scene, and Palace Skateboards were just getting started. I was down at Wayward Gallery with a couple of other mates at the time, and so all of the skate-related events came through us. At that time it was just a bunch of skaters and artists living together in a warehouse, wanting to create with our friends. Things felt a lot less global than they do now. There was so much involved in skateboarding and back then – it challenged trends and championed visuality. Things felt more organic – people were doing stuff because they wanted to, as opposed to necessarily wanting to gain followers – I mean, there were still elements of social media, but nothing quite like what we have right now. That said, I'm sure that there is still so much of that organic creativity and boundary-pushing happening, especially in street skating.

I would say skateboarding had a significant effect on the way I experienced the world in terms of play and repurposing architecture. There's this idea of looking for spots and reusing architecture in a city, in a way that it was not necessarily prescribed for, using your creativity and vision. For example, the angle of a bank that goes into some steps or a ledge and a rail, which I'm not going to skate in the way that everyone else does. Skateboarding allows this childlike creativity to continue into adulthood. I'd also say that skateboarding helped the way I perceive space, and is how a lot of geometry has come into my work. Then there's the graphic side of skateboarding and the cultural side too, so rich in imagery, art and design, as well as music and fashion.

Your work seems to have built upon this previous, perhaps more straightforward, or direct admiration of animals, evolving to a much more retrospective, anthropological gaze – as if viewing life on Earth, or Earth itself from somewhere deep in the universe. Did the transition to such a place creatively come about at a precise turning point in your career?

AG: I think it’s always been running in the background, even from my early works, but I was perhaps creating more naively back then, not necessarily knowing why I was doing it. I just felt more of a drive and a need to express. And then afterwards, I was realising more and more what the reasons were for that, and asking: “How can I explore this on a deeper level?” I think with works like Dopamine Dance (2019), my work became much more conceptual – perhaps if there was a specific turning point, that was it. Within that piece, I decided to try to personify the internet as this cute but sinister character and create a social media profile for it. Then, I essentially had an army of maneki-neko cats, 3D-printed – the Japanese waving cat, which essentially claws in good fortune, luck, wealth etc. I had all of them coded up so that if you interacted with the character's social media account, all of the cats’ robotic arms waved at the large cat head that they surrounded, playing on this idea of worship. Years later, I think the work I’ve been working on is becoming more philosophical, through the experiences that I’ve been having, especially having worked more in the natural environment over the past year.

What influence has science fiction had on your creative practice?

AG: Science fiction’s influence is a little hard to pinpoint. I’m at a place where my works are informed by this ancient past, but also futurism. The question of: ‘Where are we going?’ And ‘What's next?’ As humans, we need to question the future. I feel like it’s part of what it is to be human, and in understanding the future, we need to look at the past too. Back in 2018 I travelled to Bolivia, to visit some geoglyphs that I wanted to see in person, and went to a place called Tiwanaku. It was on a Sunday, and I took this minibus, out to this huge open valley. When I got there, there was virtually nobody there, and I was standing in this courtyard of geometric andesite forms, with 150 faces carved into stone. Each face was a different depiction of a human, but some of them looked super alien. This place really inspired me. You start to question a rock that's been carved in 2000 BC. You feel connected to the past, with it raising questions of: ‘How did they move or carve these stones before sophisticated tools had been developed?’ Even by today’s means, it’s very difficult. It started all these questions in my mind – those beyond human. The possibilities of societies, more progressive than we know. 

Your 2024 Earth Body series is, through its materials (soft clay and earth) and remote, hostile locations, bound to the temporal – fleeting pieces of art that still require hours of dedication and planning. How has creating impermanent art changed your outlook on your practice and art in general?

AG: It's really changed so much for me. It’s given me access to a completely different way of working. In May last year, I had a residency out in Finland, at Arteles called the Back to Basics residency program. I decided not to take any materials, or to have any preconceptions as to what I might create when I went there, leaving behind the comfort zone of how and where I normally work. As part of the residency as well, you have to hand your phone in at the start, so you have no connection to the outside world – you're just out in nature, in the forest, surrounded by lakes. This experience really gave me a whole new trajectory, in the sense that I swapped my brick-and-mortar studio for the forest itself. I decided to just spend every day, creating from the natural materials that were all around me. With this approach, I’m so much more vulnerable in the sense that I'm working with my hands and don't know how it’s exactly going to unfold. I had to let go of the idea of control and perfection. In a way, the materials now inform and shape me, rather than the other way around.

The way in which you work with materials seems far more physical and labour-intensive now than it ever has been before.

AG: Yeah, it definitely is. At Arteles, I had to walk half an hour to and from where I was based every day to gather materials from the forest. Being in a natural environment, listening to the birds – there’s so much information to gain, in just picking up earth with my hands. It speaks to me in a profound way, not being bound to the limitations of a computer screen and 3D programs. I'm just in a place where I’m loving my practice.

With the pieces themselves (especially the Earth Body series), I don’t see them as being finished, because the materials I’ve used have existed for thousands of years. It’s essentially organic matter that I’m gathering from right beneath my feet, and I'm just sculpting it into new shapes, with the final pieces still being alive once I’m done. For example, my piece made in Finland (Earth Body I, 2024) has moss growing all over it and was covered in snow. The one I’ve been working on in Bali has had plants start to grow out of it. So, there’s a life that begins as much as finishes, with these pieces. I don’t know whether they're going to be there for another month, or another hundred years. I’m creating these works that are in a way, their own organisms.

Your exhibition, Sensing Earth Space, with Ben Khan, opened in Titik Dua, Bali (Jan 27-March 2). How did you feel about it?

AG:I felt really excited. It’s the first time that this newer body of work is coming to a traditional gallery environment, and I’ve been excited to share these journeys I've been on. In terms of the exhibition, it’s something very different from anything I’ve done before. I’m performing, as well as creating an installation in the gallery using earth, alongside mandalas and drawings in reaction to the space. I’m also showing three films I’ve been working on with British film director, Alexander Ingham Brooke, that are being screened, alongside a performance aspect from a Contemporary and Traditional Balinese dancer, Ayu Anantha, who myself and Ben have been co-creating with. 

It’s been exciting to be working alongside Ben too, because we’ve been collaborating a lot over the past year – through sound, our artwork and our journeys through Asia. We went to Borneo together as well and he helped me in Bali, in creating my Blue Entity – Earth Body IV (2024) sculpture. As artists, our practices have slowly been combining but also breaking down and becoming something new. Ben also brought a new version of his More Human Systems Bubble Space – a huge, inflatable dome made from ripstop nylon, inflated by a single-floor fan. We’ve really been expanding, and this show embodies a more experiential perspective in terms of the work we’ve been making. It’s a really exciting time because my work’s so much broader – it is crossing many different boundaries and becoming something that I’m yet to define, but I’m happy that that’s starting to happen.

Follow Arran on Instagram.

Follow Dorrell on Instagram.

Buy your copy of Huck 81 here.

Enjoyed this article? Follow Huck on Instagram.

Support stories like this by becoming a member of Club Huck.