If Owen Bullett (born 1980) belongs to any particular tradition, it is surely that of sculptors like David Nash and Richard Deacon. However his handling of material, direct and broadside, has an expansive and elemental quality wholly his own. Whether he is using wood, metal or stone, the sculpture is all the more arresting because of its intriguing combination of opposites, of freedom and precision, of the texturally marked and smooth, of weight and buoyancy, of mass and space.

Bullett studied at Camberwell and the RCA, and continues to live and work in London. Each of his pieces is a new departure, perhaps stylistically very different to the last, each with a fresh sense of enquiry into the innate life of the material, and an innate spirit of form. Ranging from structurally complex shapes to sparer minimal pieces, his sculpture is always playful. His clear grasp of the nature and grain of a range of materials gives him a craftsman's ability to harness them differently (keeping a strong sense of the tools he has used), whether in objects of concentrated stillness or lithe energy and vaulting movement. Each explores a new set of ideas, questions and resolutions, inhabiting and enlivening its environment.

David Whiting