OM In your paintings there are combinations of both figurative and abstract elements, and some reoccurring motifs. Can you describe your approach to the studio?
NF I work over a number of months on my paintings and develop their particular imagery and formal aspects slowly over time. There are usually about ten paintings that I work on together as well as small sculptural ideas and drawings. The works change and shuffle in relation to everything developing in the studio. Sometimes I have ideas for more representational imagery that morph into something more abstract (or it can be the other way around). I like to think of the paintings’ as a kind of automaton, with moving components like a human body has – a combination of something machine-like and organic. This helps to structure my decisions about visual forms and how the elements should sit together compositionally.
OM Your studio process involves working with both two dimensional and three dimensional materials. Often the painted works include collage, and sometimes additional objects that sit outside of the frame?
NF I enjoy the physical process of making paintings, and think of them as being small flat-ish sculptures in a way. My method of collage usually involves gluing on painted canvas pieces and using overlaid stencils to imitate marks or other forms. Some of the paintings have pieces hanging off them or balanced on top. For me these additions are an aesthetic element, but also a distortion. They remind me of earrings – decorative but also a bit grotesque because of how they can deform the earlobe over time. A number of recent works included fan-shaped canvas elements as a nod to Rebecca Horn and Lynda Benglis, but they also suggest birds and brushes.
OM These were the works that you showed at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 2024? The Stars, Lands exhibition included a book with the same title in which you compiled fiction and non-fiction writing. Can you talk through your process for selecting the pieces of writing for the book?
NF The texts in the book are a selection from what I was reading whilst developing my exhibition last year. Some are from authors that I’ve known about for a while, for example Stanislaw Lem and Nina Mingya Powles, and some are from authors I encountered that year such as Adriana Che Ismail, Kim Hyesoon and Alison Glenny. There is a poem at the end of the book by surrealist artist Alice Paalen Rahon that might feel out of place but I liked the way it looped suggesting a narrative that started and ended in the same place. Many of the writings have themes of metamorphosis; humans becoming other animals or awakening to another cosmic order or possibility of some kind.
OM The texts were published in the book but did they play a role during the making of the exhibition?
NF I gathered the texts alongside the making of the works for the exhibition - so they functioned a bit like drawings – providing a different lens to think about and process ideas in development. I suppose they also helped offset the intensity of working on a single project for a year. Perhaps it was also a way to introduce studio companions who were thinking about similar ideas.
