Les Bicknell

Les Bicknell was born in Coventry, Warwickshire, in 1963. He studied a Foundation course at Lanchester Polytechnic, Coventry (1982) and took a BA (Hons) in Graphic Design at the London College of Printing (1982-85), later completing a Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching at the University of the Arts London. He moved to Suffolk in 1990 and is based at Sibton Green, near Saxmundham.

One of Britain's leading book artists, Bicknell works across bookworks, papermaking, printing, typography, folding and binding, alongside large-scale public art, sculpture and community-engagement commissions. His work is held in major national and international collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, MoMA New York, the Rijksmuseum, the Bodleian Library (Oxford), the Yale Center for British Art, the New York Public Library and the Bibliotheque Nationale. He has exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (2010), the Bodleian Library, Barbican Art Centre, Arnolfini, the National Museum of Scotland and internationally in France, Spain, Russia, the USA and Japan.

Major commissions include public artworks at Louth, Diss, Leiston and along Norfolk's Marriott's Way, the temporary Wrapping the Corn Exchange in Ipswich (2010), and the #knownknowledge sculptures in Chelmsford (2018). He has undertaken interdisciplinary residencies bridging art and science, including at the Maxwell Centre / NanoDTC, Cambridge (2017) and the Parallel Practices soft-robotics collaboration with King's College London (2015). In November 2024 he was appointed the first Artist in Residence at Sizewell C, a twelve-month residency within a three-year programme.

Bicknell is a Senior Lecturer in BA (Hons) Textile Design at Norwich University of the Arts and a Teaching Fellow at King's College London, where he co-developed the Synthetic Anatomy module (winner of the Anatomical Society's Education Innovation Award, 2023). He founded the MA in Book Arts at Camberwell College of Arts, serving as course director from 1996 to 2019, and has taught widely.