Helix, 2026

Stephen Kirin  

Stephen Kirin is a sculptor, painter, poet and collaborative artist. Chance, accident, metaphysical meditation and associations inform his sculpture. He is sympathetic to Swedenborg’s duality and Gaudier-Brzeska’s direct carving process and, like Gaudier-Brzeska, never tires of looking for inspiration in non-Western art as well as in the cultural symbols inherent to his identity. All the wood Stephen uses is upcycled or comes from a small piece of woodland of which he is lucky enough to be the temporary guardian. When the wood comes to him, he picks up its story and is tasked with taking it beyond the sum of its parts. Nuanced references to the environment are very much part of this. He is fascinated by the structure of wood as matter incarnate, and sees his role as sculptor as only one part of a larger story. All his work is hand carved with very minimal use of electric tools; finishing a sculpture too fast would defeat his purpose of translating the wood’s subconscious. Stephen owns a two-acre wooded wildlife corridor next to his studio in West Suffolk. Inevitably, trees die back as part of their natural life cycle, and his job is to use the wood he has been gifted. For each loss, he plants a replacement sapling. It is essential to him that the wood in his sculptures is upcycled and retrieved from this space, as part of this evolving process. His sculptural imagery and inspiration are fed by the rhythms of this small, vital piece of woodland, and his artistic response is a cipher for the wood’s continuing presence beyond its primary state. Stephen Kirin was born in Cambridge in 1966. Between 1985 and 1989 he studied for a BA Hons in Fine Art, specialising in sculpture, and followed this with a Diploma in Higher Education in Psychiatric Nursing between 2007 and 2010. He has exhibited widely in East Anglia, and in 2026 he exhibited a major sculptural installation as part of the Artworks East Annual Exhibition in Suffolk, UK.