The Gallery
A Million Years of NothingNick Martin
11 July - 15 August 2009
Nick Martin lived and worked in London for some years before moving to Swansea in 1988. Since the late 1980s his work has mainly taken the form of painting, but it has also included drawing, collage, print and mixed-media construction. Much of the work uses still life or natural history subjects, but this is often a means of playing with the conventions, languages and processes of representation. On show will be works from the mid-1980s, paintings from early 2000 and a recent series of wall-mounted objects.
Around 1978, prompted by his lifelong interest in animals, Martin realised that the visual language of zoological museums and natural history books could be used in art. These museums and books include fascinating combinations of signs, symbols, images, forms and materials, which can pass unnoticed, because attention tends to focus more on the information being communicated than on the language. When the educational message is absent, the medium becomes more visible. Martin began to make use of this language taken from outside art, and discovered that art history became less of a burden. What to make and how to work was no longer a problem for him.
This language allowed Martin to use humour and absurdity, because it has a surface appearance of truth. Information can be perceived as being true or factual partly because of the manner of its presentation; science having more authority than advertising, for example. Very few of these works were easily completed; they were the result of anxious concentration on avoiding unwanted interpretations, associations and implications. This apparent absence of decipherable meaning in Martins work, acts as a metaphor for the incomprehensibility of the world around us.
The later work in this exhibition manifests some of the same attitudes and interests, though perhaps less directly. Although much of Martins work is painting, he has never seen himself as a painter. He writes; "I think of paintings as flat objects. A painting is often most obviously a coloured surface and/or a window-like illusion, but it is also an object of a certain size and shape, placed on a wall in a particular position, made of various materials, with a third dimension. To varying degrees, a lot of my work has attempted to give concrete form to two everyday observations. Firstly, I am amazed by the wonder of visual representation, and in particular by the way paint can be seen as a physical substance, an area of colour, or the image of something else. Secondly, I will never quite come to terms with the profusion and the mute impenetrability of material things. There are always unfamiliar objects to see, while familiar objects retain their mystery and beauty."
