Tom Bennett is a UK based artist. He completes his degree at Arts University Plymouth in 2026 working with sculpture.

He has 20 years experience as creative lead on a wide range of projects for organisations such as the National Trust, Historic Royal Palaces and Bristol Old Vic theatre. Having originally graduated with an English Literature degree in 1997, Tom went on to teach English, Media and Film for 6 years, before embarking on an MA in Interactive Media in 2005. Working with GPS-enable touchscreen handsets, he created location-specific stories and games in cities and rural environments. This led to indoor installations and longer-term work for the National Trust as Creative Director of the flagship Croome Redifined project in 2013. 

Working at Croome involved multiple collaborations with both emerging and established artists, designers and makers from many different disciplines for a series of installations, both in the house and the gardens. Moving to Historic Royal Palaces in 2016, Tom worked primarily at Kensington Palace and Kew Palace, including the restoration of the Pagoda at Kew, where artwork was produced by Lucille Clerc and automata by Fi Henshall. His seven concept designs formed the interpretation element of the the successful National Lottery Heritage Fund application for the Bristol Old Vic’s renovation project, and he went on to develop these through to completion, again collaborating with multiple artists, including Aardman Animations and Limbic Cinema.

Tom’s return to education in 2023 followed work for the Eden Project and overseeing a flagship, Cornwall-wide community and museum arts project as project lead. Crucially, he started making pottery in 2019. Working directly with clay, and in particular porcelain, led to him embarking on the Craft and Material Practices BA course at Arts University Plymouth. He was drawn to working with glass and, eventually, steel. He is interested in how we experience spaces and other people in them, as well as our own internal space. He works in different materials and is currently working with mirrored surfaces in glass and steel, at different scales. 

Working with space underpinned all of Tom’s installation work and it has emerged as a key consideration with his sculpture. As is the human body and the encountering of people in space. His work is human scale, based on the human body, and is conceived of in terms of an encounter. Since 2025 he has been working with mirrored surfaces because of their fascinating nature. They change the nature of the space in which they’re placed and because the viewer’s eyes focus on the reflection rather than the surface, this gives a sense of uncertainty - are we looking at or beyond or behind? 

This expansive experience belies the otherwise still nature of a sculpture, but there’s a question about what is inside and this speaks to another of Tom’s considerations - internal space. We have an ongoing exchange between our internal and external spaces, and as others have noted, our internal spaces are infinite. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard observes that a closed box contains more than an open one. Imagination is a key part of our experience of the world in general and art in particular.