Nicola Anthony

Debbie Cheung interviews Nicola Anthony

To start off, how did the decision to use ping pong balls in this SEA Games project develop?

Rather than be overly literal in making sport the subject of the artwork, I decided to be a bit abstract and challenge myself to use sports equipment as sculptural material, and think about the deeper message of teams and connections within sports as a theme. I knew it would carry a meaningful message because when you get so many voices together, there is a sense of a human team, and something quite magical happens.

Pictured here is another artwork commission from a new series of works - If you would like one then here's how we can create it together:

I make these pieces by asking you for three words, then I use these to create a poetic construction of 'found words' cut from books and correlating saga seeds (symbolising love and connection) in glass alchemic tubes.

Get in touch if you would like to commission one, or click here to learn more about the commissioning

process.

This new series of seed & text artworks follows on from my previous Saga Seed Series, where I collected and hand numbered 9000 seeds from all over Singapore.  

I was thrilled to host an art & learning workshop at a Social Change in Action event this month. The whole SOCH event saw 1500 kids in attendance.

As well as a learning message for the children, I also learned a lot from the kids - a reminder that yes, art is for everyone, it can be multigenerational, it can help to change stereotypes, it has no language barrier, it works amazingly to bring you together with people you only just met, and, that art will always be a part of life: it's been around since the very beginning and will continue, to be.

Sign up to find out more about kids or adults art workshops

"The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places." Ernest Hemingway

Last month I snipped up the Earth. Using a vintage print of the globe as seen from space, I trimmed 100s of small circles, which were then re-assembled as a hovering layer using sharp, delicate, tailors pins - and finally mounted inside a mirror-lined backpack.

Clarissa Sih and Goh Chiew Tong interview Edible Art Movement for the Nanyang Chronicle, at our ‘Cirque du Scent‘: an exhibition sponsored by NTU, Jan-March 2014. Thank you to the kind journalists and film crew at Singapore’s Nanyang Chronicle for capturing the exhibition and talking with me about the concept.

The Field Trip project is a travelling exhibition in Japan and Asia. The project curator Daisuke Takeya re-claimed used elementary school backpacks (Randoseru) donated through the relief efforts, which were due to be disposed of. These objects, to me, are highly charged and symbolic. I was one of the artists challenged to create a Randoseru artwork for the Field Trip exhibition and project, to be showcased next month at Shinjuku Creators Fiesta, (Tokyo, August 22 - September 7 2014) The project is set to travel throughout the disaster areas in Tohoku, some public galleries, and festival setups in Japan.

This article has been inhabiting my mind for the past week - having re-read it's morsels of creative conceptual thought a few times, I believe it's an important interview for any contemporary artist or creative to be aware of. Coming from one of my major inspirations, Antony Gormley, are his thoughts on art, space, time, and the body. (Check out the original interview by Karlyn De Jongh here.)

Whilst my artwork David Copperfield is being exhibited at Ikkan Art Gallery in Singapore, I wanted to share one of the inspirations behind the piece with you. It is a book called The Library of Babel, a short story by Argentine author and librarianJorge Luis Borges (1899–1986). The author imagines a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books of a certain format.

Whilst you may usually spot me flitting around the contemporary galleries, absorbing the glow of neon light sculptures or pressing my eyeballs up against a brightly collaged surface, every so often I take a trip back in time to visit the old masters and re-affirm the foundations on which our current artists build their practices.

The Princely Treasures from the House of Liechtenstein is an exhibition selected from the private collection of the Princes of Liechtenstein, packed with opulent pieces from the Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo eras. Surrounding the exhibition is a series of special programmes, from sketching workshops to chamber concerts, and a variety of dynamic and interactive activities and lectures.

In the video, you will see what the Art Reborn film crew discovered when they made a visit earlier this month to the Displacements exhibition, plunging into the creative depths of 13 Wilkie Terrace to find out how the artists have used, reused, and re-appropriated a house which has spent 77 years as a family home.

Pass It On began with the idea of creating little points of knowledge and connection, which form a narrative from one place to the next, and beyond. Referencing the evolution, shift and migration of many things, the installation seeks to create a space in which to consider the positive and negative effects of the process of change, the fluid nature of culture, knowledge, memory and history. The resulting sculpture involves 8900 hand-numbered saga seeds – tiny red particles which the audience are invited to take and pass on.

Last night saw the opening of Ambiguous Portrait of a Cunning Linguist, at Ikkan Art Gallery in Singapore. I was pleased to have my sculpture David Copperfield selected for the group show of 12 internationally respected artists.

Do visit the show which will be openi until 27th July 2013, at Ikkan Art Gallery, Singapore, and get in touch to find out when I will be at the gallery.

I am thrilled to announce that I have been selected as a Young Artist to exhibit in an exhibition about verbal imagery – opening on 7th June at Ikkan Art Gallery, Singapore.

I am honoured to be exhibiting alongside internationally renowned artists who have been inspirations to my own art practice, including Ashley Bickerton, Mel Bochner, Glenn Ligon, Harland Miller, Lucas Samaras, Gary Simmons, Stezaker, and Lawrence Weiner.

I have been taking the ‘found object’ to a new level, and I will also be telling all the stories of the process of finding and collecting the individual seeds (all 8000 of them), through the artwork and via this blog. The sculpture Pass It On began with the simple idea of a sentence as a line with a beginning and end. The resulting sculpture comprises more than 8000 saga seeds, which the audience is invited to take and pass on.

Last week through a performance and a sculpture at The Substation, I asked visitors to write a sentence about the inside of their mind. Here are a few of the anonymous contributions, secrets and words from over 100 participants. (You can still add yours here)

The Substation’s ‘MinimART 4.0′ invites artists to push the boundary of art, and for this challenge I decided to activate my Word Collection in Singapore.

I am very pleased to invite you to the show, but if you are unable to come or you do not live in Singapore, fear not! I welcome you to join in online by contributing your words to become part of the artwork. You can do this before the exhibition opens to make sure your words become part of the sculpture, or do it during and after the event – the Word Collection Project is an ongoing, living, evolving text artwork.

The Substation’s ‘MinimART 4.0′ invites artists to push the boundary of art, and for this challenge I decided to activate my Word Collection in Singapore.

I am very pleased to invite you to the show, but if you are unable to come or you do not live in Singapore, fear not! I welcome you to join in online by contributing your words to become part of the artwork. You can do this before the exhibition opens to make sure your words become part of the sculpture, or do it during and after the event – the Word Collection Project is an ongoing, living, evolving text artwork.

Read on to find out how…

syn·es·the·sia

[sin-uhs-thee-zhuh, -zhee-uh, -zee-uh] noun: A sensation produced in one modality when a stimulus is applied to another modality, as when the hearing of a certain sound induces the visualization of a certain color.

I was asked to participate in the ‘Synethesia Project’ with the Fabelist Collective. To me, this theme spoke of landscapes painted with scent, movements being portrayed through melody or discord, songs splashed out in colorful ink, and days of the week flowing by in waves of texture. But things didn’t quite go that way…

It was a pleasure to meet Callaby Magazine’s editor, Rae Hippolyte in Brick Lane, London when I was back in town recently. She was interested in my recent journey to Singapore, my fascination with communication and my paper aeroplane collection. Check out the article she wrote below...

I have a bit of an obsession: My creativity has an affaire de coeur with language, words, letters, stories and narratives. Here's a glimpse into that world of word-addiction...

I often go on treasure hunts in search ofold books, scraps of stories, manuscripts and magazines.  I am intrigued with both the visual shapes & patterns of letters and words as they scrawl,  meander and march across the page… and also with their wider significance. They are story tellers and signifiers, they represent & depict the world out there beyond the page. They are cunning, devilish, candid, true.

I was delighted to be invited for a chat with DegreeART's charismatic Chantelle Purcell. She has been following my relocation to Singapore and wanted to find out more about the motivation behind it, and any tips I have for other artists and individuals looking to find a dose of a new culture and travel new worlds.

In my explorations of South East Asian art scene, its galleries and artists, I am taking in the Art Fairs - this month is Singapore's AAF, and next up will be Art Stage Singapore.

This video is my curated journey around the fair, picking out some of the galleries and artists who I felt were exhibiting work which represents the exciting contemporary art scene that is growing in South East Asia.

Just a quick post to say, you MUST check out new Google Space:http://workshop.chromeexperiments.com/stars/

(Don’t run it on IE, I suspect it will not work!)

I have spent an hour just skimming around between the stars and getting some kind of perspective on just how infinitesimal our solar system is in the grand scheme of things. Beautiful and humbling.

New York-based French artist Bernar Venet has been exploring the notions of indetermination, disorder, chance, and unpredictability through art for decades. His solo exhibition at Art Plural Gallery has been a bold introduction to Singapore. The two month show closes on 24th November 2012, so if you are in the area do catch it this week.

The artworks on show include paintings of mathematical equations set in free plastic forms, which are part of Bernar Venet’s latest series. His Saturations and Shaped Canvases comprise mathematical formulas that boast a total degree of abstraction. Talking at the gallery, Venet explains that where other artists in the past have used diverse disciplines such as religion, botanics or geometry to be the framework, subject or motivation of their art, he draws from the field of mathematics. The artist passionately notes that, uniquely, “art is a discipline in itself, that feeds itself using other disciplines…to go beyond anything that was thought before.”

Musings from my research journal:

2012 marks the 25th anniversary of Andy Warhol’s death. Catching the last day of the “Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal” retrospective at the ArtScience Museum was an early highlight (and a jet-lag kicker) upon arriving into Singapore last month.

A commercial illustrator by training, Warhol was fascinated by the relationships between fame, celebrity, art, fashion, advertising and our consumer society which he explored repeatedly in his work. Often controversial....

Having recently relocated to a new studio in Singapore where I am making a new body of work, I decided to make this post more about my working process than my artwork progress.

Singapore is amazing, sensory and inspirational. In my first week I felt both swamped in things to do (as I have everything to do in terms of exciting new places to visit, pushing forward my projects / studio / ongoing initiatives as well as setting up a new home for the time that I am here) and also a rather unusual, floating feeling of nothing to do (as I am so new to life here nothing is set in stone yet, and I have no set daily routine.)

It’s been a while since I put fingertips to keyboard. As some readers, fellow creatives and friends will know, my efforts and braincells have been flurrying around over the last few months working to set up a second art studio in Singapore. Here, I will be creating a new body of artwork, as well as some exciting opportunities for other artists who will get the chance to take part in an exchange programme. Whilst time intensive, the process has involved forging many exciting new relationships and collaborations, meeting new people and discovering new places. I am delighted, amazed and overwhelmed to tell you that I am finally here: ensconced in my new art studio, equipped with a fresh horde of brushes, metallic pigments and ink pens, in the inspiring city of Singapore.

Guess what I am doing with one of these?

I don't usually blog this sort of thing, but I was pretty impressed by this cultural spectacle. As were the hundreds of other watchers who had come to see the ceremony on the big screen at Greenwich royal naval college, which was a fantastic place to view it and a real display of the multicultural nature of London.

Anyone living in London will have noticed that in preparation for the Olympic Games, a myriad of shiny new buildings, facades and artworks are materializing all over our City. This weekend I decided to bypass the luster and ostentation of new sights, and the glister of resurfaced old ones. I took a closer look at the things that have de-materialised, or are simply not there. (Like the Australian team bus that got lost somewhere between Heathrow and the Olympic Park last week, being spotted briefly somewhere around Buckingham Palace.)

I took a look at some invisible visions and the Hayward Gallery's exhibition Invisible Art of the Unseen...

The seemingly alive installation, composed of 1,216 bronze droplets attached to individual motorized pulleys, bobs and weaves in Terminal 1′s departure hall at Changi Airport. While some examples of airline art look like they could’ve used more planning (the Oslo wang) or boldness (or less boldness, as is the case with Denver International’s “evil robo-horse” and what-the-freak murals), this moving artwork is minimalism at its best.

The exhibition presents the largest survey of new Korean art to date, and highlights an exciting group of artists who have recently emerged on the global art scene, producing work that provides an arresting insight into the future of contemporary art in Korea. The show begins on 26th July, but if you pop into the gallery now you can see a taste of Korea coming through. Intricate oil paintings on aluminium surfaces by Hyung Koo Kang really draw you in, and beautiful 'translated vases' by Yeesookyung are growing in the lower gallery spaces. Made from 'ceramic trash', Yeesookyung's uncanny and bumpy objects have organic, bubbling forms featuring fragments of Korean patterned vases joined in a frankenstein-like manner to make new, growing forms.

This piece is the fifth in the Rubik’s Series of sculptures. The series began with the premise of rebuilding a 2D ‘calendar structure’ using transparent glass & glass resin cubes, and giving this an organic, exaggerated Rubik’s cube structure – in a shimmering exploration of time, chaos & order.

Last night's private view of Games People Play saw the unveiling of a dissected dollar bill in a different format. Made from real dollars, the series is very intricate by nature, and I love that it forces the viewer to question what they are seeing and recognise parts of the dollar that they have never truly looked at before. See what you think of the images below. Visitors were very excited to accept my challenge - find the hidden message in the artwork: I have used the letters in the dollar to pick out some new words...

This new exhibition is a playful nod to any games from the Olympics, to the Euros, Wimbledon to board games, toys to political or mind games. The artists have responded to this theme to create a concoction of playful artworks that play with your mind.... opens next Tuesday at Nolia's Gallery (Southwark Tube, near Tate Modern), please join us for the private view evening.

The genre-busting artHAUS exhibition at DegreeArt Gallery is still open until June. Having been featured in the guardian's lifestyle picks, it's well worth a visit - It is very inspiring for me to see the art in the context of interior design. The art spills out onto the walls (in some cases quite literally) and inspires other elements in the room. It's very imagination capturing and eclectic. But also rather  nice to get inspiration for how to place objects & art in our own homes & spaces. I have recently rearranged my studio to reflect a string of inspirations emanating out of one central artwork.

My recent group show ArtHAUS has been featured in the Evening Standard including images of my work in the 'living room' - "Bursting with statement pieces by up-and-coming creative talent, this eclectic show is bridging the gap between contemporary art and interior design. The downstairs floor of the Hackney gallery has been split into five small spaces, each of which looks like a different room in a real home."

It's a HAUS full of intrigue - Chopped up money, amazing vintage sofas, a human sized apple, giant paintings of our lovely Queen, organic sculptures growing in the bathroom, and a 'kitchen sculpture' made from a pile of fragile, ephemeral egg shells.

ArtHAUS opened last month, and I'd like to say a big thank you to all those who came along.  If you didn't make it there's another chance to meet the artists at a private view & press viewing next Thursday. It has been fantastic to get such great coverage from the likes of Art Review and Guardian, for both the show as a whole and my own series of Ha’dollar artworks which Londonist noted as “hypnotic dissections and re-arrangements of one dollar bills that make you question what you’re seeing”.  (see more press here).