Biography

Nicholas trained at Wimbledon School of Art and completed his MA in Printmaking at Camberwell College of Art. From 2001 -2013 he led the Master of Fine Art and MA Printmaking course at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. He has exhibited on a national and international basis and recently curated the Viewfinder project as a means of bringing together the research interests of artists engaged with the digital and photographic image. Other exhibitions since 2011 include the International Northern Print Biennale Newcastle, Bite London, Seventh International Miniprint Triennial and Art Space H Seoul, South Korea.

Themed Panel

‘Transverse Mappings: Print, Media and Beyond’
In 1968 the critic Leo Steinberg (1920-2011), introduced to the audience of a lecture at MoMA, New York the notion of the ‘Flatbed.’  The term was borrowed from the flat bed of the printing press in order to register the unwieldy pressure put upon traditional notions of the picture plane by the art of the time (in particular that of Robert Rauschenberg), and a conception that did justice to the possibility of a ground open to receive the technological dynamics of new media together with the mediated image.

This panel takes its starting point from Steinberg’s usage of print media as a means for broadening the remit of the art object and its potential role as interface. This conception allows for a rethinking of print media as no longer simply a technical support but synthesizing and negotiating a variety of representational, formal and technical tools.  While some have called for a return to media-specificity, what does this mean for the expanded field of print, a medium that has always traversed media? How do we negotiate practices that lie both in the traditional core of printmaking and also at its edges and periphery? What, is the binding element, the current ‘flatbed’?

Open Folio

Road Sweepers and Dust Junkies
Road Sweepers and Dust Junkies brings together five artists who elaborate new patterns of meaning from disparate and often fragmented source material. This material has been collected, manipulated, or acted upon by each artist as a touchstone for the imagination. Hierarchies of objects and constructs in personal and collective thought give importance to the understanding of where we come from as well as bringing future directions to the fore. In each case the artists form connections which act as a compass for negotiating meaning within a field of unfolding possibilities.