Nick Warren

My practice is a multi-disciplinary synthesis focused on creating completely immersive, curated environments that meaningfully facilitate connection. The work primarily begins from a place of private, self critical deconstruction which is articulated through a tapestry of encoded symbology. The narrative is refined and distilled through the generative process of creation as conceptual exploration responds to material exploration. 

The works exist privately as confessional/exploratory narratives but are encoded and abstracted to leave only the sentiment of my textual reading. The viewer then places themselves into these fractured jigsaw puzzles of symbols and is left to construct an understanding inescapably rooted in their own selfhood as their consciousness fills the liminal and undisclosed spaces to string together meaning. It is both as much an ordering of my own consciousness as a pedagogical tool for me to draw attention and dialogue to the ubiquitous ideological, ethical, and ontological questions that I think for most people, are entirely overlooked by virtue of their size. 

Words exist as an integral part of compositions both as forms themselves but as a force to balance the tension of what contextual meaning is given or undisclosed. My painterly practice has increasingly been incorporating and transmuting itself across three dimensional forms and stepping off the canvas as the direction of my work is deeply focused on creating deeply immersive environments. When you take an intense curatorial consideration to the totality of a space; the way you manipulate light, sound, smell, how you orientate people through a room, the materiality of that room, perceiving and designing for the volume of spaces rather than a series of interconnected two-dimensional surfaces ect.

It creates environments that so wholly immerse the viewer that they can unconsciously relinquish their mental preoccupation and engage with the work from a space of curiosity and receptiveness. Cultivating immersion and trying to create spaces that allow that kind of transcendent form of engagement is one of the primary ethos that guide the direction of my practice. Experimentation is one of the fundamental practises that dictates the shape of my work. 

At a material level it's how I have taught myself by observing the way different properties can be manipulated and what qualities are inherent to them. It exists at a very practical level as my work is endlessly compounding and collaging upon itself and it exists as an assurance that If I trust in my capacity to find something of value in the unknown I will always have new work ahead of me to make.