“As a child I was fixated with cartoons. This world gave me a means of escape and a sense of empathy for the characters that were portrayed. This is reflected in my work in the form of objects being crushed and squashed by fictional events that play on ideas of pathos, subjugation and precarity. I also love the way that cartoons can make the impossible possible. I want to create a fiction in which hard materials appear to be soft and structures that shouldn’t be able to stand, do.

I often work with seemingly macho materials and subvert these with playful colours or manipulate hard materials into soft, bodily forms. The work that I make explores expectations of masculinity. I want to make work that deconstructs the elegant and ordered sculpture. In my work there is violence, fallibility, humour and vulnerability. My work contains characters that I want the viewer to empathise with.

Bright colour creates a sense of play and an enhanced reality. My palette is used in the fabric of the built environment and nature: colours that signify everything from a JCB to a post box, a modernist sculpture or a bright flower. These colours are applied to found materials and objects that articulate their forms through space.

My work speaks to a broader political picture of a world that is collapsing and is profoundly uncertain. We are constantly tricked with Ai and I want to reflect that by creating imagined scenarios that feel real and fake at the same time. The materials that I use are coated and polished, glossing over what is beneath, to conceal the reality of violent actions taking place. In a cartoon world awful things happen but it’s ok in the end.”

Julian Wild 2026

Julian Wild graduated from Kingston University in 1995. Previous exhibitions include: solo exhibitions at Leighton House Museum, Modern Art Oxford, William Benington Gallery, 1 Canada Square in Canary Wharf, and a recent duo show with Alison Hand at HS Projects. Group exhibitions include: Chatsworth House (Sotheby's), Sculpture in the City, The Fine Art Society, V22 and The Ann Norton Sculpture Garden in Florida.

He has completed commissions for: The Forest of Dean Sculpture Trail,  The University of Oxford, Modern Forms, Fidelity lnvestments, Cass Sculpture Foundation, Crest Nicholson, Wyeth Europa, Schroders Investment Management, Radley College, Jerwood Sculpture Park, Sculpture in the Parklands in Ireland, Sir George Iacobescu, Cate Blanchett, The Lightbox Gallery and Canary Wharf Group.

Wild attended an Albers Foundation residency at Thread, Senegal in 2024. He was awarded The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Arts club Trust Studio Bursary from 2009-2012. He won an individual Arts Council Grant in 2011, in 2005 he was a finalist in the Jerwood Sculpture Prize and won the Millfield Sculpture Prize in the same year.

Julian Wild was Vice-president of The Royal Society of Sculptors from 2015-2019. He is Sculpture Leader and Lecturer at The Art Academy London and is a Trustee of Chelsea Arts Club Trust.

He lives and works in Newhaven, East Sussex, UK from where he runs Cement Studios with his partner Alison hand

All photos on this site copyright to: Noah DaCosta Anne-Katrin Purkiss and Julian Wild