NICHOLAS FOLLAND
It is with great pleasure that we announce the opening exhibition of Nicholas Folland’s new exhibition at Ryan Renshaw Gallery.
In a world gripped by an underlying fear of climate change, Nicholas Folland’s work hits a fragile nerve. Whereas much of contemporary art is concerned with the sign systems of culture, Folland’s work is unique in that much of it refers to nature. The installations and objects he presents possess a silent and disturbing quality, as all elements reveal the point of incredible tension between human construction and natural chaos. There is little doubt in his work however, about which force holds the upper hand. For all human endeavour and technological triumph, we are still slaves to the overwhelming natural elements. In this way, Folland’s work is an important reminder that human intention is a far cry from human control.
“Much of my work either includes or implies a transformation taking place, or something in-between states. Hopefully there’s a sense that something has just happened, or that it’s just about to, and like a moment of realisation, it’s out of your control.” – Nicholas Folland.
Part of the pleasure, and the challenge, in Folland’s practice is tracking the various connections it makes with the often-warring worlds of science, psychology, philosophy and the prosaic. Disorientating and re-assembling seemingly familiar apparatus—cut-glassware, maps, chandeliers, ice and fluorescent tubes—he gives physical substance to thought experiments designed to unsettle the normative ways in which recognition can be displaced through precise and perverse intervention. What distinguishes Folland’s work from many contemporaries also recontextualising found objects within installation formats is its ability to strike notes of poetic fantasy.
Indian Blue (2008) and Pacific Blue (2008), enigmatic maps of ocean depths devoid of inhabitable landmasses, disturb the balance of perception by establishing a lyrical meditation on what lies beneath. Mimicking the conventions of pictorial grids, simple geometries of longitude provide expanded latitude by reducing the hard and fast stuff of concrete mapping into a minimalist landscape of monochromatic luminescence.
It is fitting that Folland has identified the obsolete signifiers of a civilized world as the matter for his elegantly constructed chaos: the pliant and thinly veneered environments of order and modesty can hardly resist de-basing. The artist recently stated in an interview that “many of my works make somewhat fictitious reference to the narratives of early exploration because these stories describe the body at its most vulnerable to nature” and in his manipulations the seemingly composed surfaces of domesticity and the interior become more allusive abjections. In this world, all things are porous as the ordinary abandons restraint and the beauty of impermanence builds in your imagination as the very essence of time itself.