Meet Homo Faber 2024 artisan Josh Gluckstein

Highlighting wildlife conservation through zero-waste cardboard sculptures

• Creates life-sized sculptures of wild animals and marine life from recycled cardboard
• A former prop maker who began experimenting with cardboard during lockdown
• His work aims to raise awareness of endangered species and conservation issues
• Sustainability and zero-waste sit at the heart of his practice

To most of us, cardboard is a humble, uninspiring material useful only for packaging or storage, and usually discarded in the recycling bin after use. But to 33-year-old artist Josh Gluckstein, it’s something incredible. From this very ordinary material he creates extraordinary things, transforming recycled cardboard into magnificent 3D sculptures and wall reliefs of animals, from lions, rhinos and elephants to pangolins, sea turtles and even a Galapagos giant tortoise.

This beautiful work is the culmination of several passions for the London-based artist. Sustainability has been at the heart of his practice since he was a child, when he started to make objects with found and recycled materials such as charity-shop clothing and discarded furniture. After studying portrait painting at art school, he became a freelance prop maker, but when the work dried up during the first lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic, Josh found himself at home in his London flat with time on his hands and limited materials available to make art – apart from some recycled cardboard packaging. Drawn to its sustainable nature, he began experimenting and quickly fell for the tones and textures of this surprisingly versatile material. Inspired by his love of animals and his previous wildlife-spotting trips across Asia, Africa and South America, he started making life-sized sculptures of the animals he’d encountered there, capturing their raw emotions and personalities with cardboard and a paintbrush.

Not simply decorative, Josh’s creations carry a message about conservation and the plight of endangered animals, another long-held passion that only grew during his travels, when he witnessed Galapagos beaches covered in plastic, and experienced precious moments with gorillas, elephants and other animals endangered by poaching and trafficking. Consequently, his 2023 show Trafficked aimed to raise awareness of the illegal wildlife trade, while he regularly donates a percentage of sales to charities including Born Free and WWF.

What’s more, by using recycled cardboard and producing no waste, he limits his own impact on the environment and the animals that inhabit it. “I collect all the scraps from a piece and build them into the structure of my next sculpture,” he says. “I really enjoy the circularity of it – how the discarded pieces from one sculpture are the building blocks of another.”

Josh will present his most ambitious piece to date at Homo Faber 2024. A 2.5m-high coral reef cardboard sculpture featuring 50 different marine species, it celebrates the rich biodiversity of our oceans. The sculpture will feature in Nature, an exhibition space dedicated to highlighting the importance of the natural world throughout our lives. Nature is one of ten spaces within this year’s overall theme, The Journey of Life. Discover more on homofaber.com