Andrew Nicholls is an Australian/British artist, writer, and curator whose practice engages with the sentimental, camp, and other historically-marginalised aesthetics, and traces the historical recurrence of particular aesthetic motifs. He is especially concerned with periods of cultural transition during which Western civilisation’s stoic aspirations were undone by base desires, fears or compulsions.
While primarily drawing-based, his practice also incorporates ceramics, photography, installation, performance, and filmmaking. He particularly draws inspiration from heritage sites and museum collections, and has coordinated and participated in residencies at locations including Greenough Hamlet (Australia’s third-most-significant heritage site), Spode China (at that time the UK’s longest-running ceramics factory still based in its original location), Midland Railway Workshops (the southern hemisphere’s most intact remaining Edwardian industrial site), the Freud Museum London (family home of the founder of psychoanalysis), and the Royal Pavilion, Brighton (George IV’s seaside pleasure palace). In 2015 he was allowed exclusive access to photograph Donatello’s David, by the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, as part of a body of work investigating aesthetic legacies of the Grand Tour, currently in production via a Fellowship from the Western Australian Department of Culture and the Arts.
