Rob Nicholls

As a child I was fond of haunting any site where things were visibly being worked on or deconstructed. The exploration of detritus generated by a collapsed building or the discovery of an abandoned location revealed an atmosphere that felt both ghostly and transformative.  The way that I navigate and explore the modern terrain provides an opportunity to engage once again with a child-like vision, activating a unique use of imagination. The landscape becomes a space of possibility where sites of wreckage and detritus can be rebuilt within the framework of imagination. Painting to me operates as a way of revisiting the experience of an environment for a second time through the process of making a picture. I am interested in the creation of spatial dualities in the decoding of an image; what could appear as an apocalyptic atmosphere shifts from a site of alienation into a hopeful place of mystery. Paint is applied thick to thin, and from slow to fast, dictating the rhythm of the oscillating environment.