Nele Bergmans and Te Palandjian
11 October - 15 November 2025
Bolding is proud to present its second exhibition of new work by Nele Bergmans and Te Palandjian. Our Blue. presents two distinct series of sculptures; Bergmans’s glass and metal sculptures “Flight to Nassau I & II ” and Palandjian’s intricate patinated bronzes.
Bergmans and Palandjian have worked closely together since 2023, when they became founding members of Critical Edge Collective—a London-based group of artists united by their research-heavy approach to art-making. Shortly thereafter, they began collaborating on a series of sculptures that framed Palandjian’s manipulated earth- and woodworks within Bergmans’s metal- and glasswork. Since Palandjian began an MFA program in the United States in August 2024, both artists have had to adjust to a new constraint on their collaboration: long-distance, Chicago to London.
Both artists began working with the colour blue this spring, independently of each other. In Bergmans’s work, blue is the colour of sky and air. Her sculptures have been inspired by the story of Charles Green, Britain’s most famous hot-air balloonist, and Robert Cocking, a pioneering parachutist who flew with him. The sculptures’ title takes its name from one of Green’s most famous voyages, in 1836, when he navigated his balloon ‘Royal Vauxhall’ on an overnight flight from London’s Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens to Nassau, Germany. But Bergmans has been equally inspired by a trip that Green and Cocking undertook together a year later, in which Cocking tied his parachute to Green’s balloon basket. On attempting his jump, the parachute turned inside out, and Cocking fell to his death. The incident—a sort of modern Icarus myth—gripped the public imagination and inspired a suite of engravings that captured Cocking mid-fall.
It has been almost two centuries since his accident, and the history of ballooning has become a footnote in the larger history of aviation. But balloon technology has played an outsized role in the development of various airborne military surveillance technologies that haunt the present and will likely serve to define our future. The first mode of aerial battlefield surveillance was the balloon, and to this day spy balloons float in the upper atmosphere reporting on military and civilian movements around the globe. Bergmans’s twin sculptures represent an attempt to reconcile the contemporary technologies of surveillance—satellites, drones, and balloons alike—with their 19th century origins. Manned or unmanned, they represent a very human urge to reach the highest places, to float up toward the heavens regardless of the risk involved. Is this an inevitable, even evolutionary, instinct?
If Bergmans has found her way to blue through the sky, then Palandjian has found her way to blue through the earth. Palandjian has spent the past few years researching desert life systems. During a 2023 research trip to a retired cactus farm in southern Spain, Palandjian became fascinated by the way that cacti decay, gradually revealing their fibrous structures in the absence of water. She collected the skeletal remains of opuntia ficus-indica (the prickly pear cactus) and a few live clippings, some of which still hosted the final few members of the cochineal beetle colonies which regularly infect the species.
In her first body of work after this trip, Palandjian’s focus was not on blue but red: cochineal beetles have long been harvested for the bright red carminic acid they produce, which became a pigment for Palandjian’s works on paper.
Now, however, she has returned her attention to the cactus skeletons. Palandjian brought them with her to Chicago in 2024. Their vascular network, desiccated to a wood-like materiality, are a record of the flow of water — the natural traces of a life in nature. Palandjian cast each cactus form in bronze. She deliberately over-engineered the systems that regulate the flow of bronze through the cast, so that large portions of the gating system (the channels where bronze flows in) and venting system (the smaller channels where air and bronze flow out) remain intact and attached to the cactus forms in the final sculpture.
As Bergmans was experimenting with cobalt-tinted glass in her Flight sculptures this spring, Palandjian began experimenting with the use of ammonia for patinating the bronzes. She pours ammonia into an open jar, and then seals the jar, together with each sculpture, in a large tub. As the gasses from the ammonia flood the tub, they react with the surface of the bronze and generate a blue patina. Because the reaction must take place in a closed system, Palandjian is unable to watch it progress and cannot predict the exact shade of the colour—as long as they are sealed away, the bronzes have an indeterminate appearance. It is Schrödinger’s blue.
These bodies of work are formally distinct, but the artists’ shared engagement with uncertainty draws them together. What is it like to linger ‘in the blue’? In the suspended moment before the parachute cord is pulled, before descent begins, before the seal is broken? In the threshold that separates the passive from the active?
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Nele Bergmans (b. 1994, Antwerp, Belgium) is a sculptor, architect, and exhibition designer. She completed her MA in Architecture at KU Leuven in Ghent, Belgium in 2017, and her MA in Fine Art at UAL Camberwell, London in 2023.
Te Palandjian (b. 1998, Boston, Massachusetts) is a land artist and sculptor. She completed her MA at UAL Camberwell in 2023, and is currently pursuing an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Prices on Application. Please email sam@boldinggallery.com or esme@boldinggallery.com if interested.