Neil Hedger MRSS is a British sculptor whose work reconsiders the figurative tradition through fragmentation, material disruption, and uneasy humour.

Working with the human form as both subject and residue, he treats sculpture as a site where existential uncertainty is imposed directly onto matter.

Drawing on the legacy of classical statuary and its claims to permanence and authority, Hedger’s figures resist idealisation. Bodies appear fractured, compressed, or misaligned, undermining the statue’s historical role as a stable vehicle for commemoration. These works operate as part of an ongoingRØT. Series – Residual Objects – forms that persist after meaning has begun to erode, misremembered artefacts that hover between recognition and collapse.

Within this framework, sculpture no longer communicates a fixed idea or identity, but instead registers the instability of interpretation itself. Humour emerges not as commentary, but as a byproduct of this failure—an awkward tension between the familiar and the incoherent.

Alongside his studio practice, Hedger has spent over three decades working within the UK film industry as a sculptor, supervisor, and Head of Department in film construction. This sustained engagement with fabricated realities—where objects are built to simulate, deceive, and withstand scrutiny—feeds directly into his sculptural language. He has also worked extensively with Madame Tussauds, producing highly resolved portrait sculptures and figures, further informing his interest in likeness, surface, and the unstable boundary between representation and object.

Hedger studied sculpture at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee, and later completed an MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London. He was selected for New Contemporaries (2008), awarded the Matt Roberts Salon Award (2009), and selected for ArtReview Future Greats (2011). He lives and works in London.