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sacrifice/ecstasy/ intoxication/dreaming/ violence/celebration/ imaginedlandscapes/internallandscapes/ utopia/distopia
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November 2011
I participated in a week-long programme of intensive coaching and development, by contemporary performance artists Nigel Rolfe, Franko B, Leah Capaldi and Jack Tan. All workshopped ideas by students of the RCA were presented as an public evening of performance art at the Royal College of Art.
As part of the college’s interdisciplinary initiative (AcrossRCA) students from design, animation, visual communication and fine art will be taken through a process of proposal, development, refinement and selection for Performance Night at the RCA. The event makes apparent how other disciplines, as diverse as industrial design engineering or textiles, can enter, enrich and inform performance art. Questions are raised about how performance consists as a field of enquiry, its development, and the permeability of its boundaries.
The Performance Night exhibition took place on 3 November 2011, 6.30pm to 10pm.
Image of piece above; " Someone to come check on me". 2011. Performance by the artist , paint and synthetic hair, in hallway. In order to navigate the space the audience was required to walk underneath the naked, hairy figure who was listening to real and imaginary noises emerging from the basement room below.
October 2011
Sculptural and durational performance piece 'After Kurangaituku' ; fabric, steel, synthetic hair, clay, paint, soil, light. As part of the group exhibition, 'BITTERSWEEET/thunderspace" at Hanmi Gallery, 30 Maple Street, London, W1T 6HA. Exhibition runs from Tuesday 18th- Thursday 27th October. ( Photographs by Jinkyun Ahn ).
July - October 2011
Just returned from an amazing time as a summer arts resident at The Cite Des Arts, Paris, France with Korean artist Seokyeong Kang.....you can see her work at; http://www.daanjee.com/
June 2011
Upcoming group shows;
'Association of Art Educators'. 19 July- 19th August, RAMP Gallery, WINTEC Hamilton, New Zealand.
'The last adventures of the Great Alonso'. 18th June- 10th July, Gallery Primo Alonso, 397 Hackney Road, London, E2 8PP.
'With the Titanic to the Moon'. Curated by Marianne Eigenheer. 30th June, Galerie imRegierungsviertel/The Forgotten Bar, Berlin, Germany.
'...dreaming but with open eyes and a open mind..'
with; Tjorg Douglas Beer, Nicky Deeley, Bea Emsbach, Rebecca Griffiths, Alan Johnston,Udo Koch, Yasimin Kunz, Patrick Fabian Panetta, Sven Sachsalber, Edwin Schäfer, Young Wha Song, Richard Wentworth, Oliver Wetterauer.--------------
May 2011
Work shown as part of The Royal College of Art Interim Show. A sculptural installation and three hour performance piece; "The Visitor and The Tusk". (Photographs by Julien Fron.)
February 2011
Three sculptures included in 'PARTIAL DECOR', a group exhibition at The Mint Hotel Gallery, Tower Hill, curated by London Met Curating Contemporary Art students in association with The Whitechapel Gallery. Also includes artists Steve Bishop and Abagail Renolds, the exhibition will run till the end of March.
January 2011
RITUAL; 15 Howie Street Project Space, The Royal College of Art, London.
November 2010
"MARCHMARCHMARCH"
An upcoming group show of new sculpture and drawing work with London based artists Joanne Peace and Lydia Whitmore............ at Drawers Gallery in Dalston, London E9 4AA.
MARCHMARCHMARCH will open with a private view downstairs at Drawers Gallery then a party upstairs at the Haggerston pub on 13th January 2011.
October 2010
** UPCOMING NEW SHOW; Thursday 21 October **
September 2010
I will be having a joint show with the fantastic New Zealand painter John Appleton which opens on Tuesday the 5th of October in Soho, London......the show will include many of the watercolour drawings as seen below and several sculpture editions.... more details to follow very soon......
JAGUARSHOES Creative Collective has included one my drawings in a limited edition collectible set of beautiful A1 prints by eleven of Londons hottest young artists....... and you can get them FOR FREE! .........very soon.. again more details to follow of where you can pick up one of these
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'Battle of the Pollen Eaters', watercolour and pencil on paper. W 700mm x 1200mm
'Three Great Warriors' , watercolour and pencil on paper, W600mm x H1200mm.
31st May 2010
More watercolour and pencil drawings on paper of Pollen City....
28th May 2010
Watercolour and pencil drawings on paper. More costumes of soldiers, musicians and other inhabitants from Pollen City, shown in their day to day life and during moments of sacred ritual practices.
1st May 2010
Have been offered a place at The Royal College of Art, in their amazing Sculpture Department.... I will be starting studies towards my Masters in October later this year....yay!
28th April 2010
New drawings, of Traps, Hysterical Arches, Hummingbird symbiosis with the heart, and Decay..... all are in watercolour and graphite and are developed from the research and props photographs from earlier in April...
20th April 2010
My sculpture 'Garden1 and Garden2' has been selected by curator Angelica Sule of Primo Alonso to appear in 'Exquisite Corpse'
PRIVATE VIEW: 29 APRIL 6PM –late
Then open: 30 APRIL – 9 MAY 2010
To mark the launch of its new exhibition space, Core Gallery is delighted to present Exquisite Corpse, an experimental approach to creating an exhibition based on the parlour game of ‘Consequences’. A chain of curators each selects an artist’s work to be included in the exhibition in response to the choice of the previous curator which is known as the Exquisite Corpse.
Curators(In the order they appear in the chain): Nick Kaplony, freelance curator, artist and Exhibitions Officer at Battersea’s Pump House Gallery who is coordinating the project. Claire Heafford art consultant and curator, Matt Roberts of Vyner Street’s Matt Roberts Arts, Sarah Schuster, Freelance curator, Medeia Cohan-Petrolino, Curator of The University of the Arts London, Angelica Sule, Curator of Gallery Primo Alonso in East London, Laura Eldret of Collecting Live Art, Zoe Whitley, curator from V&A, Helen Griffiths, Freelance curator and Deptford’s own Julia Alvarez of Bear Space, Bea De Souza from Agency Gallery.
Artists (In the order they appear in the chain)
Liv Pennington, Lucy Newman, Tasha Aulls, Justin Richel, Leni Kauffman, Nicky Deeley, David Raymond Conroy, Linda Florence, Iris Priest, Jock Mooney and Rebecca BirchCore Gallery's highly considered and dynamic annual exhibition program explores, excites and stimulates discussion. It provides exhibition space for contemporary work by both emerging and established artists and curators. The Gallery is an artist-led exhibition space, situated in one of Deptford’s thriving artist-run studio complexes.
General Opening times: Mon-Weds by appointment, Thurs-Sun 1-6pm
www.deptfordartmap.com/core-gallery
Cor Blimey Arts, C101 Faircharm Trading Estate, 8-12 Creekside, Deptford, SE8 3DXApril 1 2010
A selected photograph of the research costume and props models created in the studio to prepare for an upcoming sculptural installation involving hummingbirds and sacrifice. .... It's a meditative but violent moment between man and animal, symbiotic and very neccesary for my imaginary society to function. . . .
"BATTLE TALISMAN no1"................New wall mounted sculptural piece. Cast and carved plaster, wax and synthetic rope....H;120cm W; 10cm
20th February 2010
These are preliminary sketches for "THE TRAPS" print series.......... Left to Right Top to Bottom; " Trap3" "Trap2" "Trap1" "Trap4" "Trap5"....all pencil and watercolour on paper.... W; 21cm x H28cm each
IDEA FOR A ROOM................................"Two birds visit each other in matching towers"
14th September 2009
LUCK AND RITUAL AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
Wow, Spark Festival 2009 in New Zealand held at WINTEC, was amazing, with such infectiously enthusiastic staff, students and public. I was really honoured to be asked to lecture about my work. Other speakers included Nuie/New Zealand painter John Pule, Russian Filmmaker Marina Goldovskaya, Brazilian filmakers Guto Barra and Beco Dranoff, Irish war photograpaher Paul Seawright and New Zealand fashion designer Denise L'Estrange-Corbet. I'd also like to give a big thankyou to Suzanna Wilford who organised the entire event.
Spark was also the launch of a new and on-going project about luck and ritual ; "The Talisman Guardians". I created nine mixed media objects (the first of many to come) based on research into lucky colours, shapes and substances, and they were given away via a 'lucky draw system at the close of the festival. The selected guardians agreed to create a personal repeated ritual around the object, for an entire year, adding any materials or substances during their ritual that they see fit. At the end of the allotted time the Talismans will be sent to my studio, each will permanently assume the name of the owner and be exhibited alongside its 'before' photo, and any text from the owner. Can luck and ritual be created? Can spiritual and emotional weight be given to these seemingly random objects through repetitive acts combined with specific thought?
19th July 2009
Armed with my first ever Holga, here is a selection from the costuming and movement experiments with the Mating Mask, BlueMask, KitchenMask and the Samurai Arrow Deflection Armour as seen before in the studio. We took them to location in Epping Forest to see what happened when we performed in a natural yet still public environment, here are some of the results using double exposures and slow speeds. These will later be enlarged to prints....
17th July 2009
Mask for Enemy Arrow Deflection
MatingRitualMask
****SPARK INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL 2009*****
I am gladly participating as a guest speaker this year.
My lecture will be on Friday the 7th Of August at 11am till 12pm at The Gallagher Hub, Hamilton, New Zealand. I will speak about my work and ideas and concepts that knock my socks off and fire me up... come along!
Spark is a week of talks from various arts practitioners, so check out their programme on the website.......................www.spark.net.nz............................ to see who else you can catch. I will also be running an sculptural/performative event to coincide with the festival closing, where beautiful sculptural talismans will be paired with 'adoptive' volunteers from the audience....turn up and you can walk away with something magical you never knew you needed....then there will guest Brazilian DJ's and a nice party ........... ALLLLright!
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July 9th 2009
L-R ; "The Mouth Dragon Mask" . " The Eating Mask". Preliminary experiments into costuming, ritual and the role of the body.
July 3rd 2009
(The Watching Mask Experiments...)
(The Waiting Mask Experiments...)
July 1st 2009
June 14th 2009
You know what is great? Meats on Faces!
June 10th 2009
New Mask for summer...
May 30th 2009
Some idea drawings...
DANCING MASK....
COFFIN FOR MOTHERS....
COFFIN FOR FATHERS....
DANCE SUIT....
RITUAL DAGGER ....
April 16th 2009
Pleased to be confirmed as a guest speaker at SPARK09, the international festival of design,media and arts, in Hamilton New Zealand, this August.......www.spark.net.nz
March 24th 2009
Spring is coming! Beautiful new studio!
January 10th 2009
PING PING PING, at Seventeen Gallery 17 Kingsland Road, Hoxton, London , E2 8AA. It runs till Saturday the 24th of January, and the gallery is open Wed- Sat 11am till 6pm.
For more info see; www.seventeengallery.com
Press Release from the gallery;
Seventeen is proud to present new works by New Zealand born artist Nicky Deeley.
The exhibition constitutes a series of totemically charged depictions of dead or dying creatures. The corpses of ornate coiled serpents, imagined velveteen marsupials sit alongside contemporary corporate mascots, a caricature sausage is captured in the ecstatic death-throes of its ritual sacrifice. Each of these forms a miniature death garden that sprouts foliage, permeating every visible surface in an explosion of fauna, fungi and flowers; a force stretching chaotically outward.
The human relationship with the innate and sometimes startling power of the natural world is a theme that runs throughout this exhibition. In particular Deeley's florid, chromatically abundant sculptures celebrate the predispositions of animistic or 'magical' culture to engender mythic, ritualistic and ceremonial engagement with the unanswerable questions that human existence proposes. The bizarre fusion of the natural and contemporary iconography within the work presents the notion that, refracted by a post-enlightenment perspective and transposed into a sea of 'personalised' ideology, these mechanisms and meta-narratives today continue to inconspicuously manifest in the western world.
Fashioned from a consciously cluttered range of materials and executed with a glossy touch, Deeley's expired creatures appear as a hopeful and strangely whimsical treatment of the ordinarily brutal natural processes of decay and entropy.October 5th 2008
here are some of the new sculptures which will be included in the upcoming show...
September 7th 2008
Upcoming solo exhibition of sculptures and paintings at Seventeen gallery, Kingsland Road, London is entitled;
"PING! PING! PING!" , and will run from the 10th December till the 24th of January 2009...........
July 20th 2008
Interview about my work in this months issue of VICE magazine...
May 10th 2008
ALOHA, ALOHA, WELCOME TO THE NEW WEBSITE... **************************************
The recent show "The Hummingbird Ceremony" in January of this year featured a collaboration with Italian composer Simone Salvatici. He composed a twenty minute piece entitled...."Dragon and Birds " in reaction to the sculptures and themes of the works. Using instruments such as kalimba, mandolin, effects pedals, feedback and cymbals he has created a delicate, enchanting and yet bloodthirsty layer to the experience in the gallery, as it played simultaneously from underneath the sculptures, in each of the rooms. You can hear two excerpts from the piece below...and also listen to the entire work on his myspace page here.......... and see his official website here.......
May 10th 2008
Have just finished working with VICE magazine on a photoshoot on an upcoming feature about my work...it will be out in the June issue ....
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Really pleased to confirm a solo exhibition of upcoming new work at Seventeen Gallery in Shoreditch, London, in November............................
1 March 2008
Exhibition of the 2001 piece, "Three Buildings and a Squirrel Drama", as part of the featured artist series at The Waikato Museum, New Zealand. Curated by Leafa Olga Wilson.
14th January 2008
The Guardian Weekend Newspaper has printed a review of
"The Humming Bird Ceremony", which came out in the Saturday 18th Jan edition. Here is the online version ;
Some photos of the works shown in the gallery are here, and the rest are coming soon.....it is open every;
Thursday - Sunday from 11am - 6pm or by appointment, till 24th of February 2008, at;
Gallery Primo Alonso, 397 Hackney Road, London, E2 8PP
December 2007
Invitation for the upcoming solo exhibition in London below;
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More previews of works in the upcoming show, two of the almost finished sculptures and a graphite and ink drawing on aged paper...
October 2007
Studio portraits by Los Angeles based photographer Jo MacCaughey..........
August 2007
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Inclusion of the 2001 Sculpture "Prairie House" in the group show " EXISTENCE" at The Waikato Museum of Art and History, New Zealand. Curated by Leafa Olga Wilson. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog.
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HERE are some selected images of "Ninety Golden Slippers"at Terrace Gallery, London. Or you can see them in the exhibitions section.... it takes a wee while to load....
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May 2007
Time Out London Magazine has reviewed " Ninety Golden Slippers", in the print edition out May 15th.
"Ninety Golden Slippers".
"Reminiscent of the characters created by Canadian artists Jon Pylypchuk and Marcel Dzama, New Zealander Nicky Deeley's installation of oddball, anthropomorphised, furry creatures probes areas of folklore, folk art and fantasy, combining cute and cuddly with sexual and unsavoury aspects of the human phyche. A porcupine and a sloth like animal are playing cards for money. A big black beaver with an eyeless, waxy pink face is carting off a sledload of monkey-beings whose strange expressions become even more obvious signs of sexual ecstasy when you notice their female public areas have been highlighted with delicately embroidered gold thread. The human finger necklace hanging from the beaver's neck implies cannibalistic as well as carnal intent. Elsewhere, drawing and design come into play. Maori patterns adorn a wooden birdhouse on which sits a rodent-snouted figure surrounded by bones. Stare hard enough at the bold, block like design covering one wall and its spells out the words ' Do It Baby'.
From Little Red Riding Hood to Blair Witch, the forest has often stood as metaphor for sexual awakening and the murky depths of subconscious fears, but Deeley's introduction of subversive deign into the mix of childhood innocence and male violence adds another twist to the tale. You may be charmed and intrigued but, but whatever woodland community this is, you're not sure you'd want to stay and play. "
Helen Sumpter Time Out London. May 16 2007
May 2007
"Ninety Golden Slippers" a solo show of sculptures, paintings and wall drawings.
Opens with a private view and drinks at;Terrace Gallery, on Friday the 4th of May. 5- 17 Frederick Terrace, London, E8 4EW.
"Exploding hearts and broken legs!"
"Sacrificial mice and songs for your sweetheart!"
"Little cakes and Big Bets!"
