Join us for Richard Dean Hughes third time exhibiting with Xxijra Hii and his first solo exhibition in our London gallery, exhibiting all new works.
July 11th - August 9th 2025
In Choice Dirt, Richard Dean Hughes offers a meditation on the raw material of existence. Deliberately ambiguous, the title evokes a terrain both literal and conceptual: dirt as the ground beneath our feet, but also as a vessel of legacy, conflict, spirituality, longing. It is where things begin and where they are buried.
This new body of work delves into our deeply human desire to find place, to make choices and to question their consequences. Sculptures appear caught between states of emergence, erosion, suspense - as if always in the process of becoming. Hughes explores how history and the present collide, allowing sculpture and light to carry the weight of both. The result is a shifting archaeology of lived experience, one that questions not just where we are, but how we got here and whether we are truly home.
Light plays a crucial role in the exhibition acting not as embellishment but as a structuring force. In Embering, illumination becomes time itself - flickering between mortality and memory, touching on the unfinished as a site of emotional truth. The work draws upon Michelangelo’s Bandini Pietà, a sculpture intended for the artist’s own tomb, left incomplete and later deliberately damaged in an act of personal frustration. That raw emotion - of a master confronting decline, doubt, and impermanence - echoes through Hughes’ treatment of the piano as both relic and portal. A sense of mortality settles quietly into an object made for resonance. The piano, with its potential for beauty and song, becomes a site for reflection - its presence domestic, but its atmosphere spiritual. Light moves through it as though passing through the oak it was once carved from; conjuring a vision of the tree alive and casting time in overlapping moments. The work connects the past, present and the self: inviting the viewer into the role of ancestral witness - someone who feels history not as something distant, but as something internal and continuous. This experience links us to places we’ve never stood and lives we somehow remember.
Elsewhere, in works like Super Tuscan and Soltrace, the body, vessel and landscape blur. Hughes’ hallmark vessels reference amphorae. Weathered and dislocated yet transformed through contemporary processes rooted in ancient function. Masks trace the physical effects of imagined journeys evoking both the tourist and the time-traveller, the fertility figure and the fractured self. Super Tuscan draws the viewer into the space with an active and directional force, passing through the mask and into the portals of Embering. These forms do not arrive or depart - they hover, held in suspension and hinting at movement without closure or cessation.
Tundra and I Don’t Know Clouds at All examine what it means to endure across landscape and time. In Tundra, a baguette becomes a site of tension, marked by exaggerated drops that suggest decay, digestion and desire just beyond reach. Its cracked surface resembles a scorched or frozen terrain, evoking a topographic map of an inhospitable landscape. Inspired by depictions of food in Mantel’s Wolf Hall, the work speaks to human hunger, not only for sustenance but for connection and power. I Don’t Know Clouds at All extends these ideas into a colder, more atmospheric register. Resting on a plane of newspaper and surrounded by leaves, it draws from the same logic of written history; markers that attempt to locate us in time and place. Both works navigate landscapes shaped by absence, where material and language operate as codes for what we long for but can’t fully hold.
Hughes’ practice persistently engages with dualities: objects that are made and unmade, forms that are at once domestic and sacred, ideas that are solid yet speculative. Across the exhibition, there’s a sense of psychic excavation and a search for grounding within the unstable. Themes of legacy, ancestry and anxiety thread throughout the work, reflecting a world in flux and a deep internal grappling with belonging, purpose and time.
Choice Dirt offers a space where time feels unstable and existence blurs. Memory shapes the ground and the pull of what might have been sits quietly beneath the surface. It’s a place where meaning is never fixed and reinvention feels both necessary and inevitable. Hughes does not provide fixed answers, instead he cultivates a space where the weight of the past and the uncertainty of the present coexist and where meaning seeps in slowly, like water through earth.
All enquiries info@xxijrahii.net
