BIOGRAPHY
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, and with 18th century Britain's fascination with, and paranoia of, other cultures and 'othered' identities.
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. In 2017 he was the first Western Australian artist to undertake an ArtSource residency with Residency Unlimited, in Brooklyn, USA, and more recently undertook residencies with Grey Projects in Singapore, in early 2020, the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2022 and a thematic residency at The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity from November-December 2023.
Nicholls has exhibited across Australia, Southeast Asia, Italy and the United Kingdom, including solo exhibitions in his home town of Boorloo/Perth, as well as Canberra and Sydney, Australia, and Plymouth, England. He has been the recipient of two Creative Development Fellowships from the Western Australian Government, and undertaken commissions for several organisations in Australia and the United States, most notably a drawing commission for Duke University Press, a $250,000 ceiling mural for the City of Perth Library, and a major drawing commission for the Artbank collection.
Nicholls has curated projects for organisations including the Art Gallery of Western Australia, FORM, the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, and Object Galleries Sydney, and written for most of Australia’s major national arts publications. His work is represented in collections including Artbank, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the City of Bunbury, Central Institute of Technology, Curtin University (50th anniversary commissioned artwork and commemorative products), Edith Cowan University (with Sandra Black), Janet Holmes à Court, The City of Joondalup, Murdoch University, the Kedumba Collection of Australian Drawings, Turner Galleries’ Art Angels (10th anniversary commission), and the City of Perth. He is a member of Art Collective WA (www.artcollectivewa.com.au) and shows with .M Contemporary, Sydney.
Image: Nicholls in the Music Room at The Royal Pavilion, Brighton, 2015. Photograph by David Charles Collins, with thanks to the Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton.