Nick Austin

Nick Austen

On
Appetitb

Consider these works as compositions; come to them as poems, to be sounded out, tested on the eye and rolled around the mind.

Auckland artist Nick Austin presented a collection of new sculptures based on his experiences of concrete poetry, combining objects and materials with a lightness of delivery and economy of gesture. Materials function as ideas of form, at once completely contained and open, while waiting for a reader to enunciate their existence.

Austin says “I've been thinking about these works as arrangements of found material, of ingredients, that speak to the verbal qualities of looking. I’m interested in the works’ visual delivery, specifically the idea of a flatness of delivery, the sense of timing and mistiming within them.”

“I have also studied the compositions of sandwiches, jokes, and crossword puzzles, as a means of thinking about how the how can become the what. I am very interested in economical gestures and how the way something is made might be apparent in what it is.”

Austin intended the exhibition to inhabit many planes of the gallery architecture, and though object-based, to be “quietly immersive, in a way that sound art can be.”

Nick Austin graduated with a Master of Fine Arts, Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland in 2004. He is a member of artist-run project Gambia Castle in Auckland and is represented by Starkwhite, Auckland. His solo exhibitions include Strands, Clumps at The Physics Room, Christchurch, 2007 and Poor Memory, Gambia Castle, Auckland, 2007. In 2007, Nick Austin received a Creative New Zealand New Work Grant through which the works in this exhibition were made.