Arran Gregory is a British–Sri Lankan artist based in the UK. Working across sculpture, performance and film, his practice explores our relationship with the natural world through raw materials including clay, earth, sand and natural pigments. His work draws on ancient building techniques while considering ideas of impermanence, place and the living landscape.

We’re speaking to you after you’ve just completed your solo exhibition at OmVed in London, how are you feeling?

I'm feeling great, OmVed is such a special, hidden gem and the perfect setting to tie together all the work I've been creating over the past couple of years. It feels good to give it context back in London, the city I'm from.

Your work often begins with a landscape rather than a studio. How did you arrive at working with land art and natural materials?

I've always been interested in exploring our primal, elemental self as humans and as animals. In 2024, I left the studio where I had been living and working for a decade and decided to go and create outdoors. I went to Finland for an art residency where I spent a month working in a forest with no phone or internet. I then spent six months travelling in Indonesia, and spent time in the jungle in Borneo living alongside an indigenous community.

My journeys deepened my relationship with meditation as well as my understanding of our relationship to nature and all living beings. I purposefully took no materials with me or any preconceived ideas, which opened up space for renewed perspectives and experiences. I began creating from found materials, building from the environment, and then stepping away to let the environment collaborate and evolve naturally out of my control. This really allowed me to experience and perceive myself in relation to nature rather than nature in relation to myself. The materials began to speak their own stories rather than the other way around, and, since this shift in perspective, I've been learning so much more.

It's become quite magical watching the works evolve, decay, flood away or sprout as living organisms. There's so much metamorphosis and change constantly happening.

Your sculptural works are made using rammed earth, an ancient building technique that has seen renewed interest as a sustainable material. There is something fascinating about techniques that have existed for centuries being rediscovered today. Do you think we have something to learn from older ways of making?

My sculptures are made using various techniques like cob building and adobe, as well as rammed earth, which I have learned from various people and communities as I go. Every culture around the globe has a history of working with the earth and natural materials - it's a wisdom that we are craving a return to in an age where the disconnect is becoming all too felt. We need to be back in touch with the Earth. I find working outdoors with natural materials physically and psychologically empowering. It's grounding, in the most direct way, and clay is just this magical substance that has so much to teach us.

You recently led a rammed earth workshop at OmVed Gardens. How important is sharing and teaching within your practice?

I had twelve participants help create a rammed earth sculpture from a mould. It was my first workshop, and it was a hit! There's a wonderful sense of shared ownership - overcoming together and building with your hands that is so affirming. The making process becomes so ritualistic and therapeutic.I'm feeling proud as it's important for me to share what I've been learning from working this way. I really believe it can help people and communities. Working with earth is a simple reminder of the joy to be outdoors, working with our bodies and alongside one another. People were joking about how they felt they should be singing together whilst working - I think, had we spent more time together, this would have definitely happened.

Much of your work exists outside the traditional gallery space - created in landscapes, often temporary and then documented through photography and film. What freedoms does this give you, and what challenges does it bring?

It's not been without its challenges. The journeys I've been on have so far all been self funded, and where a part of me would love to just leave it all behind to go and live in the woods, another part recognises the importance of voicing this work back in the city. I can feel its importance - when people view the films or follow the journeys through my journal, they feel this sense of real reconnection, from a place of remembering who we really are - it's like an outlet. Because the large scale land art works I create are mostly impermanent, my documented journal, photographs and films often become the work itself, which calls to be shown in the gallery.

My exhibition at OmVed was a great opportunity for this. It's reciprocal - the forest offers me freedom to explore, and the city calls me back to share my discoveries within a contemporary context.

Your work seems to ask us to slow down and pay attention. Do you think our relationship with nature has become too distant, and can creativity help us reconnect with the world around us?

It's increasingly challenging to find time to slow down in the city. We've privileged ourselves with a constant treadmill of distractions that's exhausting. I think our relationship with nature is ultimately a relationship with ourselves, and as our rate of operating on the planet constantly speeds up, we are falling out of sync with the rhythms. Nature is slow - not through trying to be, but by just doing it’s thing naturally. It's about being present.

A friend recently drew my attention to a great line from a David Whyte poem - 'I may constantly cry that I need more time, but actually time needs more of me'.

This really resonates, and I think it's true in regards to the distance we feel from nature. To experience the natural world is the greatest gift we have, and if we slow down to observe, the synchronicity happens naturally. True creativity can only arrive when we tune into the flow of things. When we tune into nature's rhythms, everything becomes music, poetry, and dancing again, and we remember the Earth is our teacher. The antidote has always been to just go outside and fall in love with curiosity and a sense of awe for this world we are a part of. This doesn't have to be six months in the jungle in Borneo - it could be from noticing a tiny weed growing from a curb outside your house.

Every artist develops their own visual language. How did you find yours?

I found mine really early on. What's most important to me now is learning how to let go of it.

What is your relationship to clothing? What do you find yourself wearing when you’re working and is it something you think about?

I need space to move around when I'm working, so prefer my fits on the baggier side. I'm not so into trends, I think I just love wearing functional workwear and letting it age alongside me, so I tend to wear the same things for years once I find something comfortable.