Nick Ervinck GNI-RI nov2025

Nick Ervinck
GNI-RI nov2025: Mano, Virtual Reflection
9 November - 13 December 2025

Nick 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.

Alongside the material sculptures at MOCA London, Ervinck has created digital sculptures that exist in the MOCA London parallel virtual reality exhibition Gni-ri nov2025: Mano, Virtual Reflection. Both exhibitions 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.
Ebook
Press Release
@moca_london
www.nickervinck.com
@nick_ervinck

Works List:
1. Manodiroi, 2025, digital render
2. Manodiero and Manodaliar, 2025, digital render
3. Manodiero, 2025, digital render
4. Manodaliar, 2025, digital render
5 - 6. Manodaliar, details, 2025, digital render

MANO Series – Sculpting the Post-Natural Body
I. Introduction: From Flesh to Form
A reflection on Ervinck’s exploration of the hand (“mano”) as symbol of creation, touch, and manipulation — bridging biology and digital design. The hand becomes both organic and mechanical, echoing human agency in shaping nature and code.
II. Material Hybridity and Digital Craft
Connecting with the language of the Cyborg Bonsai and Story of the Stone, this section explores how Ervinck fuses organic growth and digital mutation. The MANO sculptures appear to be grown rather than built — a tension between craft and computation.
III. The Hand as Interface
Philosophical exploration: the hand as an ancient interface between body and world, now extended into machines and algorithms. The MANO series reveals this posthuman condition — where gesture becomes data and sculpture becomes an embodied algorithm.
IV. From Skin to Machine
Critical reflection on the porous boundary between flesh and technology. The MANO works extend themes from SKIN and PLANT, shifting from epidermis and growth toward manipulation and agency — the human impulse to intervene in evolution itself.
V. The Ethical and Aesthetic Question
In the spirit of wabi-sabi and mono no aware, imperfection and decay persist within synthetic perfection. The MANO sculptures ask: what remains human when creation itself becomes computational? They act as contemporary allegories of transformation, vulnerability, and control.
VI. Conclusion
A final paragraph situating the MANO series as a meditation on making — between artifice and empathy, hand and code, the sculptural act and the digital gesture. It ties back to Ervinck’s ongoing project of redefining sculpture as a living interface between worlds.

Biography
NICK ERVINCK (° 1981) graduated in 2003 from the KASK (Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Ghent) with a master's degree in Mixed Media. He then trained in computer modeling, sculpting and working with materials such as polyester, plaster and wood. After teaching at art academies in Tielt, Menen and Kortrijk (2004-2012), he returned to the KASK to spend three years as a visiting professor here. His work consists of large installations, handmade and 3D printed sculptures, ceramics, prints, drawings, light boxes and animated films.

As diverse as this art production may be, above all, he remains fascinated by the "negative space" as he discovered it with classical sculptors such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. The finding that a "hole" in matter is such a young idea will probably haunt him for the rest of his life. As a child of his time, he plays a varying game between the physical and virtual world, using both classic and new craftsmanship (computers, 3D printing and milling). From here he explores in his own unique way classical themes such as man (with a focus on his anatomy and the emergence of cyborgs), plants (especially their genetic manipulation), masks and animals, always starting from an (art) historical background that he cuts with contemporary pop and sci-fi culture.

He has received several prizes: Prix Godecharle (2005), The Fortis Young Ones Award (2006), the Provincial Prize for Fine Arts West Flanders (2006) and the Rodenbach Fund Award (2008). In 2013 Ervinck also won the prestigious Merit CODA Award for his art integration IMAGROD