Hello, I'm Nick A.

I completed my MA in Fine Art Painting (Distinction) at University of Arts London (Wimbledon). My studio work explores the constructed quality of botanic and backyard gardens through the concept of heterotopia - a space that can be characterised by incompatible juxtapositions that can produce ambiguity and disturbance. Botanic gardens have long fascinated me as highly curated and culturally constructed spaces in which humans and plants co-exist​,​ interact and collaborate with each other. The ambiguous effects this can produce​,​ such as the visual confusion from observing plants that would not grow together in nature​,​ render these gardens fascinating heterotopias. My aim is to create work that examines the ambiguity​,​ incompatibility and strange beauty that arises from an engagement with these botanic spaces. My work presents a visual realm where borderlines between plants are engineered to create demarcations but are at the same time permeable and in a state of flux. Here​,​ the use of spray paint can suggest fluidity between plants and convey their fizzing energy on the canvas​,​ while stencilling with living plant material provides me with a collaborative mode of working with plant life. Highly pigmented colour elevates the sense of strange even monstrous beauty in paintings that depict incompatible and (un)desirable plant forms within the same space. Overall​,​ my work hopes to collaborate with the viewer​,​ encouraging them to see beyond the literal figurative references to gardens we might be familiar with. One major concern has been the development of visual languages through striking colour palettes​,​ stencilling and the use of spray paint and acrylics to re-interpret the constructed qualities of botanic and backyard gardens. My work is less concerned with historical tradition of representing and celebrating the garden as a marvel of human control over nature​,​ than with how plants and humans collaborate in botanic gardens where plants​,​ not humans​,​ are given primacy. Indeed​,​ weeds feature prominently in some of my work as interesting plants in their own right​,​ but whose occupation in botanic and yard gardens is marginal and often deemed undesirable. These plants may also have a place in botanic heterotopias despite efforts to eliminate them.