A Los Angeles-based artist, designer, and creative engineer, Richard Wilks received his BFA in 1988 from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He began his career as an experiential designer for clients including Disney, Target, and Nokia, creating environments encouraging conversation and connection.

Now, fusing the eclectic influences of commercial art, the maker movement, and festival culture, Wilks continually expands the scope and breadth of his dynamic sculptures and installations. He uses a combination of physical and digital tools to build pieces from steel, aluminum, and plastic waste, conceptualizing and crafting original machines and fabrication processes to bring his work to life.  

By drawing parallels between biological and mechanical processes, Wilks challenges the distinctions between natural and artificial, individual and environment. His artworks engage viewers in full-body experiences that prompt them to reconsider their relationships to objects, space, and one another. Each of Wilks’s sculptural pieces is motivated by a relentless curiosity about our essential humanity, and requires physical interaction to reach their full potential. Spectators use their hands to send the Liquid Forest, a series of luminescent sculptures made from recycled plastic, spinning. Wilks’s inventive vehicles, the Aquatrope and Evotrope—inspired by our elemental connections to the natural world—are ready to drive. Organic shapes like circles and spirals are frequent motifs across Wilks’s work, mirroring Earth’s cycles and seasons. Likewise, Wilks’s fabrication processes often mimic biological ones, with his bespoke machines digesting and transforming refuse into raw materials. 

This inclusive, integrative approach informs both Wilks’s studio practice and his environmental activism. As a longtime advocate and community member in Downtown Los Angeles, Wilks hosts meet-ups and workshops to explore plastic recycling and processing, give project guidance, and strengthen local activist efforts. 

Wilks’s work has been shown at museums, galleries, and art fairs nationally, including The Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Cincinnati Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum of California, INFLUX Gallery, and Maker Faire. In 2023, his Liquid Forest sculpture series received a coveted Burning Man Honoraria award.