There is a moment, standing before a crumpled “cardboard” box that turns out to be Portland Stone, when perception buckles and meaning rushes in—an everyday object becomes a mirror, and the mirror is carved from marble. That is the kind of shift Tom Waugh orchestrates, quietly and precisely, inviting a second look at what is usually thrown away.
Tom Waugh MRSS is a British sculptor trained in the rigorous language of classical carving, graduating with a First in Architectural Stone Carving from the City & Guilds of London Art School in 2005. His early years on landmark sites—St Pancras Station, St Martin-in-the-Fields, and St George’s Chapel, Windsor—sharpened a craftsperson’s discipline that now underpins his contemporary voice.
A scholarship-backed journey deepened that voice: time in India with temple carver Raja Saceran, supported by the Ballardie Travel Award, sharpened his sensitivity to handed-down techniques and the spiritual patience of stone. The touch of those traditions lingers in his surfaces—the way edges soften into shadow, the way texture decides the truth of a form.
Waugh’s subject is the detritus of modern life: plastic bags, blister packs, tin cans, traffic cones, and the “fossils” of our consumer era half-emerging from rock. He carves them with a faithfulness that feels like documentary—creases, dents, shrink-wrap shine—but places them in materials of permanence, creating a charged contradiction between what lasts and what we meant to last only a moment.
Material choice is the hinge of his storytelling: white marble performs as plastic or polystyrene; ironstone comes off as oxidised steel; Portland Stone slumps like tired cardboard. The effect is trompe l’œil with conscience—the eye is fooled, then the mind is nudged into asking why such un-precious forms are now treated like relics.
Waugh studied, almost anatomically, the classical strategies by which marble becomes flesh, hair, or drapery—and he borrows those tactics to elevate everyday throwaways into portraiture. The drape of a plastic bag recalls baroque fabric; the lip of a crushed cup has the delicacy of carved eyelids; a fork, scaled to trident, stands like a myth puncturing geology. The quotation is sly, but it’s also sincere: he holds classical ideals up to consumer realities to expose the distance—and the kinship—between them.
Within that tension lies the work’s quiet argument: we are both dependent on nature and destructive of it, at once subordinate to stone time and intent on accelerating disposable time. His sculptures hold those tempos together, making paradox visible: humour sits next to elegy, Pop scale sits beside archaeological poise, progress questions its own purpose.
Waugh’s carvings thread through public and private space: from the fabric of St Pancras and Windsor to collections at Warwick University, Gladstone’s Library, and Messums Wiltshire. His exhibitions span Messums’ London and Wiltshire platforms, festivals and academies, with recent shows like “Future Remains” casting 11 new works as a lexicon of permanence versus refuse. Along the way, honours—Rise Art Prize for Sculpture and People’s Choice, RWA recognition—marked a trajectory both artisanal and incisively contemporary.
Those shows are not merely displays; they are social scenes of recognition and recalibration. Visitors lean in, touch what they assume is cardboard, and find cold stone—prejudice cracked by temperature. The shift is sensual first, then ethical, the way a familiar song suddenly reveals a lyric that was always there.
There is an intimacy to carving a crushed can that architectures rarely afford. Hours pass inside a fold; days accumulate in the wrinkle of a bag; months arc across a single manufactured seam. The time he spends is a counterweight to the seconds we spend disposing, and the work records that exchange—his attention for our inattention, his patience for our haste.
Some pieces swell to monumental scale, borrowing the swagger of Pop to make a cone or fork heroic; others appear like paleontological finds, half-born from boulders, announcing the Anthropocene in a quiet, geological grammar. In every case the realism is a door, not a destination, and what enters is care.
Waugh’s sculptures do not scold; they outlast. They propose that the imprint of use—the crease of a box, the bruise of a can—is a kind of human handwriting, and that handwriting deserves to be read before it is erased. In an age of speed, he offers a carved pause, a durable attention, and a question that keeps sounding: what do we elevate, and why?
Tom Waugh : Website | Instagram
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