Nick Ervinck - GNI-RI nov2025: Plants and Alterations

Ervinck explores the dynamic intersections between nature, technology, and human influence, in his GNI-RI nov2025: Plants and Alterations, using sculpture as a medium to question our evolving relationship with the environment. Known for merging virtual reality, digital design, 3D printing, and traditional craftsmanship - Ervinck’s works exist in a liminal space between virtual imagination and material reality. His sculptures unfold as hybrid organisms - half digital, half material.

Ervinck challenges the dichotomy between the real and the digital. By combining hand-painting, gilding, and glazing with digitally generated forms, he brings texture and imperfection to the algorithm. Rather than emphasising artificiality, his work explores the tension and interplay between natural and constructed forms and creation of co-existing multiple realities. His sculptures exist between the synthetic and the organic blurring the boundaries between the two realities.

Aelbejark, is a 3D-printed, hand-painted strawberry, part of his Plant Mutation Project, was inspired from his meeting with the plant scientist Dr. A.P.M. Ton den Nijs from the Plant Breeding Department at Wageningen University. The sculpture references genetically modified plants and explores the potential and ethical uncertainties of scientific advancements. The strawberry’s unfamiliar colours of blue and yellow and its mutated form provoke reflection on humanity’s power to reshape nature and the possible consequences of doing so.

Ervinck’s Nebkatrobs, mutated cacao beans partially gold-glazed and fleshy texture becomes a symbol of luxury desires, cultural and biological manipulations. These small, hybrid seed and bean-like sculptures, suggest the birth of a new nature: artefacts of speculative botany that merge craft and technology. They represent fragments of growing forms, symbolising the cross-fertilisation between living species that could lead to a thriving new nature emerging from the shadows of our current environmental destruction and social injustice. They posit adaptation and survival in the face of ecological collapse, hinting at a future that straddles evolution and invention.

His work bridges the gap between contemporary digital techniques and traditional craftsmanship, as seen in the Akritanot ceramic piece. Inspired by Meissen porcelain and Baroque excess, its plant-like structures are reminiscent of algae or flowers fused into a chaotic order and formed as a mutated ornament. Its skeletal membrane, organic curves, and orifices evoke a dreamlike imagination - a sci-fi laboratory of distorted interlinking species.

Alongside the material sculptures at MOCA London, Ervinck has created digital sculptures that exist in a parallel virtual reality of the exhibition space. The two realities coexist, creating an uncanny experience for viewers. The act of engaging with the art becomes a disorienting encounter, where the memory of the exhibition lingers between the physical and digital realms - like fragments of a dream that blur the lines between what was seen and what is remembered.

Ervinck’s work challenges us to reconsider the boundaries of reality, nature, and artifice, offering both a warning and a wonder-filled vision of the future.

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