Against The Flow

Welcome to Damien Nicholls’s portfolio, a curated space where creativity meets technical expertise for well over a decade. Hovering between Surrealism and Art Brut, the works showcase a diverse range of styles and mediums to express the artist’s response to local questions with universal resonance. His inspiration owes as much to the Australian bush as it does to a post-industrial world.

ARTIST’S BIOGRAPHY

Born in 1969 in Western Sydney, Damien Nicholls’s sculptural work follows a long line of internationally renowned artists, who mainly chose to work with recycled waste as their raw material, as opposed to working with more traditional sculpting materials such as stone, bronze, clay, resins, ivory or gypsum. His work combines a profound appreciation of nature, gained over years of camping, hiking and walking the bush, with a visceral need to reclaim and rebirth the by-products abandoned by consumerists societies. Adverse to waste of any kind thanks to a childhood scarce on luxuries, where repurposing discarded objects not only triggered imaginative play but elevated his natural problem-solving skills, Nicholls carried the lessons well into adulthood, resulting in the creation of works with universal resonance. Whenever the artist conceptualizes a new piece, his typical modus operandi is to always figure out first how to bring his vision to fruition despite the inherent technical challenges already imbedded in the materials he chooses to transform.

Like many artists before him, Nicholls reclaims existing objects, waste generally foraged from kerbside collections, dumps, landfills and second-hand shops. This particular approach to art has been broadly labelled as Recycled Art and generally comes into two accepted forms, called either Upcycled Art or Downcycled Art, which are no less than two complementary approaches using recycled material in opposite ways.

Essentially, Nicholls builds new connections between objects and forces the viewer to create new associations by insisting on the transformative power of recycling the old into a brand-new piece which escapes, by its very definition, its original purpose.

Coming into his own as an artist at the age of 50, after a lifetime living on the fringes of the art world, Nicholls’s lifework highlights the most controversial issues debated in Australia over the last decade. The meaning behind each piece could hardly be understood without evoking the specific context which gave rise to it, with the artist simply refusing to sidestep the intriguing avalanche of associations, both artistic and socio-cultural which permeates each individual work.