South African artist Nic Bladen (b. 1974 Pretoria, South Africa) is known for his extraordinary botanical sculptures, which demonstrate his pioneering technique of casting entire plants in bronze and sterling silver. After being trained in dental technology and working for eight years making gold and porcelain crowns in various dental laboratories, Bladen developed an interest in sculpture and began working at the Bronze Age Foundry, learning large-scale bronze casting as well as all aspects of metalwork.

‍

Knowledge of the two seemingly different fields precipitated Bladen’s experimentations in 2001: casting flowers and leaves. In marrying the micro and macro disciplines, he pioneered a way of developing perfect castings of organic matter. His way of preserving/fossilizing plants and flowers involves a method known as ‘lost wax casting’ (or cire perdue) and it involves creating moulds from actual organic material, and then transforming these into once-off sculptures of entire plants.

‍

Bladen’s unique works can be found in the Standard Bank Art Collection, Ellerman House Cape Town, BMW and Oppenheimer Collections, as well as in many other prestigious private collections, both locally and abroad.