Nicole Coson

Exeunt is a term used in theatre which describes a point in a play wherein all characters depart from the stage leaving behind only the set and its props.

The collages in this series are weaved from a single source, a photograph of a tree lined pond by my childhood home in the Philippines. These works are imbued with personal history, specifically focusing on episodic memory, the trauma of loss and the secondary loss we experience when we inevitably and unwillingly begin to forget.

The original image serves as the stage of a memory I constantly return to in my dreams and in my waking life, the instance in which I fall into the pond and am pulled out of it by my late father. Each completed collage becomes a part of a library, a personal catalogue of the same moment accessed differently. Through building layers of details extracted from the same image, I attach a different kind of distortion to each work mimicking the slippery and unreliable nature of memory as well as its ability to change and degrade, as well as adopt new unexpected features, like a neglected garden.

The memory is played over and over again, becoming scratched, mishandled and weathered with time like a favourite record. The steel sheets onto which works are installed are my old etching plates which further reflects the this idea of age and weathering from repetitive use. The rust accumulated on the surface records marks made by the oils left from hands during handling.

Exoskeleton is a series of works made using Venetian blinds, a simple and commonplace object seen from within as well as from outside the home.

As the virus drew closer to the UK, and I witnessed family in Asia slowly withdrawing into isolation, I made these works in anticipation of the day in which we would no longer be leaving our houses. The day in which our doors were sealed shut and our only way to see the outside was through the glass of our windows.

While producing these works, I was thinking about how the pandemic was transforming or shifting our notions of the public and private. As the edges of our bodies began to blur, the walls of the house became the outer epidermis that was protecting us from the outside. I felt like we were like oysters on the seabed, entombed.

To make these works I carefully applied oil based ink onto each slat of a set of old Venetian blinds and pressed canvas against it to produce an imprint.

These works are in reference to a traditional weaving pattern called Binakul from the Northwest of the Philippines. It is believed that evil spirits hovered overhead and preyed on sleeping souls. The pattern on the fabric is intentionally dizzying and is used as an invisibility cloak to protect the sleeping wearer from being detected by the demons above. I attempt to recreate this effect this using camouflage netting, a modern device, like razzle dazzle, designed to obscure the edges of tanks, weapons and buildings which would otherwise be vulnerable to opponents who patrolled the skies. Camouflage netting normally appears in colours reflecting the terrain in which it is deployed, but devoid of this, their insidious agency is flattened and what emerges is this ancient safety blanket.

Thank You,

Nicole Coson

nicole.coson@gmail.com