Almost Whole

Royden Mills // 2012

Welded Steel
Belgravia Art Park

About

Almost Whole is a vessel with an opening through it. It contains a sense of strength and permanence in spite of it having a large open hole through it.

Light green in colour, architectural, [the] human made form engages with [the] organic form in an interdependency to promote a contemplation point where the two become one. Permanence of natural events and insistence of structure combine.

Royden Mills

Royden Mills is an Alberta-born artist with a studio near the North Saskatchewan River west of Edmonton. He teaches Studio Art in Art Fundamentals Drawing and Inter-media, and Contemporary and Figurative Sculpture at the University of Alberta.

The psychological charge felt in moments of being are often sources of inspiration in Roy’s practice. He often sets up situations where the audience physically engages in transition between a sense of what is within a state of being and what is beyond the physical body or architecture in that state.

In addition to extensive international exhibitions, Royden has created many large-scale commissions, installations, and collaborative performances nationally and internationally. He has enjoyed many successful collaborations with artists such as Sean Caulfield, Catherine Burgess, and Walter Jule. In 2014 Royden won the William Hardy Alexander teaching award and the Faculty of Art teaching award at the U of A.

Royden has coordinated all 32 sections of Art and Design Fundamentals at the University of Alberta and taught and supervised while maintaining a very strong professional studio practice over many years. In 2017, he was inducted into the Royal Canadian Academy of Art and won an Alberta Foundation for the Arts Project Grant to attend the Digital Stone Project in Italy where further work with stone carving can advance in the summer of 2018. His first studio was in rural northern Japan where he and his wife lived for two years.

Royden was encouraged greatly throughout the years by the great British sculptor Sir Anthony Caro and many of the Edmonton Region’s leading sculptors including Ken Macklin, Al Reynolds, Isla Burns, Catherine Burgess, and Clay Ellis. He sees the need to pass this encouragement on to younger generations of artists and often curates exhibitions and opportunities internationally for young artists wanting to build a professional studio practice.

Belgravia Art Park

Almost Whole

About

More From This Artist

Resonant Progression

Royden Mills

Related

Pumpkins and Moons

Ken Macklin

Caesura

Bianca Khan