QUESTIONS OF TRAVEL |

BY DEIRDRE MCATEER

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‘Where should we be today?’

‘And have we room

For one more folded sunset,

Still quite warm?’

Elizabeth Bishop

 

Camomile flowers droop from their buckets and vegetables stack and tower, overspilling the old bleach box that holds them. Flags hang, and leaves drip, and de-contextualised road signs loom, imperious and omniscient, marooned far from the California highways they once surveilled like God. Holiday souvenirs and gauzy images of sights half-remembered, from places long ago visited, stack while tourist attractions in the form of a glaring, twisted cherub vie for cramped room with coca cola bottles and deckchairs, herbal remedies and football shirts. 

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The instinct to collect, assemble, collage, is a central preoccupation of WINGS, the first solo UK exhibition by Nell Nicholas. Comprised mostly of snapshots of travel, real or imagined, the images layer, merge and proliferate on the canvas, their newfound proximity sometimes evoking unease. Through the process of assemblage and collage, and the resultant visual barrage that is the experience of viewing these works, the collection considers questions of travel and reflects on the discordant position of the tourist. I think of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem Questions of Travel, which also reckons with the blend of wonder and estrangement felt when elsewhere, the impulse to capture through photographs and souvenirs, and the impossibility of faithfully rendering the experience in its aftermath. Where should we be today? Have we room for one more folded sunset? Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

 

The instinct to collect is reflected in the form of the work itself, the large, mostly monochromatic, collage style paintings and porcelain tiles that comprise the majority of the collection. It is also perceptible in the depictions of markets and shops that recur throughout the collection. Uniform across culture and often moved through perfunctorily, these paintings ask you to consider markets anew, as taxonomies of a place and its people, as something vibrant, even intimate. MERCADO, a collage style oil painting depicts the produce and wares found in Mexican markets. In football tops and in herbal remedies and in children’s toys, whole worlds unspool in the sum of the parts, in the places where you haven’t been paying attention. The sag and droop of the brush strokes, the slightly weeping skin of the thing, conveys a sense of objects overlooked, or discarded, or maligned. But the puddles of gold paint illuminate them like precious things, beautiful landscapes. If this is treasure, who can collect it?

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These are works interested in exposing perception as an active mode of participation in the world and, by extension, reflecting on their own complicity. Consider whether these images want to be looked at. The few people in these works are captured in moments of rest, relief and play, but always with heads turned, unaware they are the object of your illicit gaze. In KING TACO the cherub, evoking those that guard the Fountain of Neptune in Bologna, turns to intercept the gaze of the viewer with a hostile, blank-eyed glare - a moment of self-consciousness reflected in the positioning and watchful, wary face of the guard dog. Images of actual captivity echo throughout WINGS; the jaguar in the wildlife sanctuary, flocks of birds in cages, wings beating a din we see but cannot hear. The masked clown, macabre in mid-spectacle for an audience unseen. The barbed wire. Who is allowed to move freely throughout the world? Who is allowed to assume the role of tourist? And who are we to look at these in a Soho art gallery? ‘The choice is never wide and never free’. Elsewhere symbols of mass tourism, and the systems of production it generates, encroach. The deckchairs, their canvases a curiously blank duplication, portray a recognisable scene of a uniform type of leisure resort tourism, and are inspired by the coastal beaches of Cyprus, where mass tourism erodes the coastline. The plinth, composed of porcelain tiles themselves evocative of souvenirs readily available at tourism hotspots, features perhaps the most notorious symbol of global capitalism in the form of the McDonald’s golden arches, evoking the question of what has been replaced with yet another identical franchise. Tourism, and the tourist, are inextricable from the destructive systems they intertwine with and extend.The vast size of these paintings accommodates the synchronicity of these things coexisting. The slippage afforded within the proliferation of decontextualized scenes and leitmotifs communicates the discordance, between beauty and dread, between curiosity and voyeurism, between engagement and complicity, that this collection reckons with.

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Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? In WINGS, resolution is glimpsed but not reached, illumination arising in the discordant fragments of assemblage. It is complexity, in simultaneity, in perpetuity. That is the whole point.