Nick is a artist and boater based in London and onboard the 1903 narrow boat ‘The Eileen’ taking a ‘Slow Journey’ around the English canal system…

Multi-disciplinary artist Nick Holt grew up around the limestone villages, tors, caves and moors of the Derbyshire White Peak. However, for over thirty years he has lived in London, and at times, more peripatetically on a 1903 Birmingham Canal Navigation day boat called ‘The Eileen’ undertaking an extended and very slow journey around the English canal system.

“I think making & doing, in its widest terms, is all about, and always has been about, synthesis, love, loss and connection.”

Nick makes unruly layered works that have a tendency to take unexpected turns as he explores memory and sense of place through paint, photography, writing, walking, and drawing .

“My work tends to explore ideas around belonging, longing, identity, memory and loss. They are not works involving resemblance, though they are perhaps tangentially attached to the physical world around me.”

The layered, disrupted and fragmentary works tend to defy easy categorisation. The inherent logic driving the developing work having nothing to do with representation, and everything to do with a dialogue with time and place, and the work itself, as it is being made.

“The works evolve only slowly, and emerge organically from the process of collecting, reacting, making and doing to the degree that, at the start, I can’t see, and have no wish to see, the end-product, which is then arrived at through a combination of researching, walking, accretion, reduction, layering, wiping-out, painting-over, combining, printing, drawing, writing, blotting, collating, masking, sanding, scrubbing, and scraping…”

The works are emotional and aesthetic journeys of exploration. Nick’s work is as much concerned with psychological ‘inscapes’ as aspects of the physical landscape. This results in ‘compendium’ compositions, increasingly taking the form of book-type works in which multiple viewpoints are the norm and motifs are aesthetically and emotionally analysed, synthesised and sometimes broken down to the extent that their original identity is willfully dismantled. It’s an associative and experiential approach to art.

“I want to clamber about in memories and association, getting psychological ‘muddy boots and rain on my face’. I lean towards what might be described as ‘new natural’, a suggested placescape or common ground that may reference a particular time or place but doesn’t strive to reproduce a particular view of it.”

Expressing a singular identity is not his aesthetic or conceptual concern but rather he is interested in how memory and identity in a constant state of becoming. Nick is fascinated by the ways in which we describe and translate our experiences, our stories… He believes art-making to be a ‘process of unearthing’.

“I’m looking for resonators and signifiers of memory. I like the idea of ‘bringing into being’, of changelings and the ambiguity of life. The dance between states of wholeness and fracture, re-assembling and invention are all valid, and part of my personal response to the stuff of life…”