Nick Malone A Tale Of Two Lives
14 - 25 MARCH 2017
183-185 Bermondsey Street London SE1 3UW
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CONTENTS
Travelling through Time and Space: Meaning and Interpretation in the Work of Nick Malone
5
An Essay by Anna McNay
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The Disappearance of Makepeace A Tale of Two Lives
10
Plates
31
Anna McNay in conversation with Nick Malone
47
Biography
52
Credits
56
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Travelling through Time and Space: Meaning and Interpretation in the Work of Nick Malone
Nick Malone would rather think of his current practice as that of a painter who writes, than a writer who paints. His career trajectory has taken him from writer, with a sideline as a literary academic; to painter; to painter employing fragments of text in his works; to, most recently, author (does one say author, or artist?) of a graphic novel, purporting to tell the (abridged) story of his far from mundane life. For his exhibition at Art Bermondsey Project Space, Malone will bring together this graphic novel, as it currently stands, with a soundscape bringing to life its final, dramatic sequence, and some of his recent, large three-dimensional paintings, all of which draw from what he describes as his ‘personal and private mythology’. In such a scenario, without knowing the artist’s story in advance, one might well wonder how the visitor is to pinpoint any meaning in the work, or, more importantly, whether there even is such a thing. What can one hope to find? ‘They do have meanings,’ says Malone, of the assorted works that will be on display. ‘And they all emanate from this common vision. But there is no absolute … There are differences in emphasis.’
artist’s intention are external to the work of art as an aesthetic object, Virgil C Aldrich delineates a difference between an artist’s intention and the meaning of the work. ‘ Just as someone might say something he did not intend to say, so may an artist fail to get his intended message across. […] Thus do the material and the medium have their own powers of expression which may run counter to the intention of the user, depending on how he deploys them.’ 1 He concedes, however, that knowing both the subject matter and the artist’s intentions ‘tends to assist one to grasp what is in the work’. Malone, however, would not see such a difference in intention and received meaning as a failure. The ‘differences in emphasis’ he refers to are, if anything, quite deliberate, stemming from his deep-seated intrigue with ‘ambiguity, and the possibilities of multiple significance in meaning’.2
Malone’s paintings deliberately eschew a hierarchic structure, as he seeks to introduce chance into his practice, initially by pouring paint over hidden Using a model, whereby the subject matter and objects, creating a 3D landscape, and it is their
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mixed-medial nature, in which word and image simultaneously elucidate and obfuscate one another, ‘sharing the same space, though remaining clearly distinguished in terms of spatial relations, kind of intelligibility and often the division of labour,’3 that engenders what Simon Morley terms ‘topographic’ space, namely space subsuming both time and space.4 Accordingly, as well as subverting hierarchies, Malone’s works breach the boundaries of painting, considered since GE Lessing’s seminal essay, Laocöon: An Essay upon the Limits of Poetry and Painting (1766), to be a medium concerned solely with space:
Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, with which he opens his graphic novel: ‘There’s always the “you” and the “I”, and the “you” is the Makepeace [a character in the novel], who opens the trapdoor into another world. […] The two worlds co-exist and you can go between one and the other. There’s this constant dialogue between the inner and the outer worlds. Imagination comes from this. It’s the human psyche.’ By employing word and image side-by-side, or, rather, interwoven and meshed, one on top of the other, Malone’s works insist upon two distinct modes of information gathering – one involving the visual scanning of the image and the other the reading of the words. The former mode allows freedom of interpretation and uninhibited mental and sensual movement, while the latter confines the reader to a predetermined route, constructed from a row of letters to be deciphered from left to right or top to bottom.6 According to bi-lateral models of the brain, image interpretation takes place in the right brain, the site of non-logical, intuitive skills, while language is sited in the left brain, which shows a bias towards the rational, logical and discursive. Morley concludes, therefore, that the interpretation of word and image not only occurs at quite different speeds, but, involving different orderings of perception, ‘we simply cannot do both simultaneously’.7 Thus returning to Aldrich’s discussion of the origin of meaning, the material and the medium of Malone’s work clearly exploit their own ‘power of expression’, with word
‘Painting, by virtue of its symbols or means of imitation, which it can combine in space only, must renounce the element of time entirely, progressive actions… cannot be considered to belong among its subjects. Painting must be content with coexistent actions or with mere bodies which, by their position, permit us to conjecture an action [ie. imply a narrative].’ 5 In Malone’s work, both space and time play a role, and a certain level of ambiguity necessarily arises depending in part on which plane you view it from. In the graphic novel, the level of diachronicity, or ability to travel back and forth through time, is made explicit by the use of windows cut from one page through to the next (and back), an idea developed from Richard McGuire’s Here (Pantheon Books, 2014). This time travel might also be seen as space travel, however, but specifically space travel between inner and outer worlds. As Malone explains, drawing inspiration from the lines of TS
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and image each drawing the viewer down its own I. Signifier II. Signified route. Bringing the overall picture together in one’s Language III. Sign. MYTH I SIGNIFIER II SIGNIFIED mind is not so much a process of discerning the III. SIGN meaning as of creating an interpretation, and it is this interpretation that offers the full aesthetic experience.8 This mythical signifier ‘postulates a kind of knowledge, a past, a memory, a comparative order While Malone’s work may arguably have one of facts, ideas, decisions. […] When it becomes central subject matter (recall: ‘they all emanate from form, the meaning leaves its contingency behind; this common vision’), his use of multiple media and it empties itself, it becomes impoverished…’11 The materials means that there is no direct mapping essential point, however, is that the form does not of meaning to interpretation. This situation, suppress the meaning entirely, it is still there, albeit of a ‘quantitative abundance of the forms […] at a distance, to be drawn on. correspond[ing to] a small number of concepts’, is equally a result of the model employed by Roland ‘The meaning will be for the form like an instantaneous Barthes, in his analysis of myth as a metalanguage,9 reserve of history, a tamed richness, which it is possible to and this model might be carried over to explain, call and dismiss in a sort of rapid alternation: the form must in greater depth, the presence of ambiguity and constantly be able to be rooted again in the meaning and to multiplicity of interpretation in Malone’s work – get there what nature it needs for its nutriment…’12 work dealing, as we have heard, with his ‘personal and private mythology’. Thus, in the case of Malone’s work, putting pre-established fragments of text together with In Mythologies, Barthes takes Ferdinand de fragments of imagery is like building a doubly Saussure’s model of the linguistic sign,10 as complex myth and creating a metalinguistic sign composed of the signified (the underlying mental from two or more pre-existing signifiers, each of concept or form) and the signifier (the arbitrary which may draw on multiple pre-determined material aspect of the sign, with which the signified meanings. Depending on which features one becomes associated) and proposes a secondary or calls up, and in which combination, the resulting meta-system, whereby the mythical sign (the myth) interpretation might be infinitely construed – a is composed of a signified and then a signifier, rich plethora of ambiguity. Barthes concludes: itself comprising a pre-existing sign, the meaning of which is already complete. ‘Myth is a pure ideographic system, where the forms are still motivated by the concept which they represent while not yet, by a long way, covering the sum of its possibilities for
{{
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representation.’13
NOTES
Since Malone’s work, like the mythical concept, has at its disposal an unlimited mass of signifiers (words and images), and since ‘there is no regular ratio between the volume of the signified and that of the signifier’,14 so there is no limit on possible routes to and outcomes of interpretation. Aldrich’s conclusion therefore holds: both form and content (or, in his terms, medium/materials and content/ subject matter) are key to the aesthetic experience and interpretation, and this, with his rich variety of mixed media, is an understanding that Malone exploits to the full.
1 Virgil C Aldrich, Philosophy of Art, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1963, p92 2 Owing to a long-term friendship with the writer William Empson 3 Simon Morley, Writing on the Wall. Word and Image in Modern Art, London: Thames & Hudson, 2003, p10 4 ibid, p17 5 GE Lessing, Laocöon: An Essay upon the Limits of Poetry and Painting (1766) (trans with introduction and notes by Edward Allen McCormick), Baltimore, MD, 1962, p77. Cited in J Dixon Hunt, D Lomas and M Corris, Art, Word and Image. Two Thousand Years of Visual/Textual Interaction. London: Reaktion Books, 2010, p15 6 Morley (2003), p9 7 ibid 8 Aldrich (1963, p94) elaborates on this, using Dylan Thomas’ poem, The Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait, as an example: ‘Suppose […] you ask […] what does it mean? This could be taken as a question about content and subject matter […]. But to press the question in this direction would be to turn your back on what counts perhaps even more, which is the texture of the medium of the composition; and that is what a good interpretation […] will draw attention to. How does the interpreter do this? How does he help you to the aesthetic experience of this property of the medium? He reminds you of the materials of the poem, not its subject matter.’ 9 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, (selected and translated from the French by Annette Lavers), St Albans: Granada Publishing Limited, 1973, p120 10 F de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, New York: Philosophical Library, 1959 11 ibid, p117 12 ibid, p118 13 ibid, p127 14 ibid, p120
© Anna McNay, February 2017
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‘Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky, Like a patient etherised upon a table;’ T.S.Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
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The Disappearance of Makepeace: A Tale of Two Lives
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For thirty years
I have wondered what happened to my old friend Makepeace, who disappeared without trace sometime during the autumn of 1986. Although he vanished into thin air, I have always felt his presence guiding me, without precisely knowing whether he had arranged his own disappearance, (as he sometimes talked of so doing), or whether he was, in fact, now dead.
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Until then we had combined our skills, he the dreamer, the Prospero of fantasy, I the practical, the arranger, the interface with the everyday, negotiating our passage. Thus, when I arranged finance or cars or accommodation, it was Makepeace who suddenly opened what seemed like trapdoors or windows into another world beyond.
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All of us have different personas struggling inside for dominance, different characters with their different drives and life views, gestated and emerging out of the wide range of experiences that build up to form our lives. Yet if we were to somehow try and categorise them, I feel that they would all fit into two elemental groups - on the one hand, the fixers of everyday life, the pragmatists who deal with what they consider to be the true realities of life, timetabling and organising our experience, feeding the mouths and fixing the roofs of our mortal existence. And on the other hand there are the dreamers that live out of time and place, that in the wink of an eye open the trapdoors of eternity.
Suddenly I could leave the unanswered questions over Makepeace no more. Ever since Makepeace had made his strange disappearance I had searched for an explanation of his vanishing. Of course, one reason for this was my dependence on his extraordinary gift to open new vistas of enchantment that broke through the everyday, like a magician who could just touch his wand-like finger on some mundane object - say, a document or a piece of wood - for it to spring open, as through a magic window, into a galaxy of dreams and possibility.
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Down through shoals of muted eyes . . . charcoal, acrylic and wood on canvas, and measure 184 x 206 x 30 cms 2016
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But there was also the money, the vast sums that he seemed inexplicably to have access to, my realisation that in my own case it had only been by following his nefarious advice, leading to my criminal encounter with John Brace, that had enabled me through smuggling to pay for my art education. It was then I remembered that Brace, (also now strangely vanished), had visited Makepeace’s house on a number of occasions after his release. This house had been locked since his disappearance, and it struck me that there might be some clues there to the mysteries that had haunted me for so long, not to mention some indication of the source of that huge wealth on which Makepeace had always seemed able to draw. During the time I had known Makepeace, it was always an absolute taboo that under no circumstances was I to visit his house in Elm Street, and the keys he had entrusted to me were under no circumstances ever to be used to gain access, and were only entrusted to my possession for use in absolute emergency, and only following his express instructions. It was therefore with extreme trepidation that I approached the house that November evening, inserted one of the keys he had given me, and slowly turned the lock.
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On closing the door, I was enveloped by a fused rush of darkness and buried smells as I located the bannister and hauled myself up the stairwell to the dormer bedroom at the top of the house that I had identified from past conversations as the one he habitually used. On entering the room, it had, to my astonishment, the appearance of somewhere still in habitual use, an impression that was no doubt created by the room being his main base immediately before his disappearance. There was the refectory table covered in drawings and papers, there the open dormer window overlooking a sea of slate. And walking forward into the room, it seemed that everything fused into my own room back at Summerfield, where I had planned so many adventures. An abrupt movement and noise made me spin round, and there, in front of me, stood Makepeace! With a fixed, blank stare, his face white with determination, he walked slowly towards me. I staggered backwards, flailing, moving, I realised, toward the open window. My nails embedded as anchors in the soft wood, I heaved the world vertical, held it still, dropped the weight of my exhausted arms, my chin, through the open sash, and then peered down.
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Ascend on light the sleeping stair charcoal, acrylic and wood on canvas, and measure 184 x 206 x 30 cms 2016
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Fragments of wood
on a straight, grey stream; the morning traffic was already moving. I looked above and the sky seemed filled with blossom where lozenges of cloud slid in position like coffins, like petals on slow moving water viewed from the riverbed. From below the drones of engines rose in swarms to fill my head then fixed in the wings of something hovering by my shoulder in the empty house. Twisting round, I saw an effigy hanging in green armour in the empty air of the room, now finally cleared of all visitation; I stretched a hand; the dragonfly swung, then sped through the open window where squadrons of insects were swimming through the moving skies.
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I watched the collapsing banks of cloud
struggling for structure and again reforming new shapes that changed or dissolved, their shifting fleeces drenched in gold. A flock of wild geese circled in silent sweeps, their white necks so stretched they might choke with longing. Below, the world wheeled on the spokes of streets. I pressed against the sill, I stood up. I saw in the banks of cloud a roaring chaos dissolving on; and again in the middle of this, something struggling for structure being dissolved and then again rising before final collapse and replacement. I heard the wind to Callisto blowing through my body’s frame and on past those random, sky-flung symbols of the night, its gentle roar as a rising flame, as the morning’s first cars. I was one with each struggling shape that mute in the mass of dissolving cloud sang with silence through my every cell as some inchoate consciousness struggling fitfully for meaning and form before being tumbled back in the void for fragmentation and change. The sky stretched taut, lit and translucent, each building vibrant in its frozen light, the distant bridge a blanched rainbow of stone. I was going, making my escape to barely glimpsed worlds beyond all comprehension, a runaway chimpanzee in the dawn and rain, free on the high, empty roads striding for the distant train, tears streaking my tired, century-creased, simian face; or swung from the trapeze to soar without end, the torn tent of the world growing smaller and smaller below.
I found my feet on the window’s ledge.
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Where Squadrons of Insects Were Swimming Through the Open Skies . . . charcoal, acrylic and wood on canvas, 184 x 206 cms 2016
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Surely now, now, this time, this time I could fly, could join them? I thought I
heard myself whisper, yes, I can, I can fly, I’m, I’m
flying
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I saw the terraces of the turning town that suddenly flapped skywards, their cobbles as if nailed in the gates of heaven; I flew behind them to ranges of mountains that steamed like cattle in the early sun, and on past oceans of cobalt, the frames on their littered beds lighting like x-rays. And then I could see past the world’s rim as a driver over a wheel, steering through the gaps of stars to where, it seemed, all whiteness failed.
Observe us here through the green-fogged pane of the névé, peer past the ice-hung bars. Slowly, waiting for the coming thaw, our frozen forms emerge a menagerie of crystal light rising for the distant stars.
......
Ice to leaves. The owls are rain. The cave streams rise. The snow cap dreams. All things metamorphosise. All spins as one in the dance of change. Here we shine forever.
I am now with Makepeace.
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In every locked room strain the rays of the moon to pull you through your house of ghosts. Stretch for the hands of the conjured dreams, drift-dust from the waiting lands, the movers of your waking days, still they elude. See them rear and guide your way, feel their soft power. They fly for the clouds, melt and reform. Leap to where they disappear as all your drives dissolve and change The owl is a flower. The goat is a flame, The lidded ground flies up.
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The hour dissolves the ice, the flower. We are all around, in water, air. Pirouetting everywhere we shift and change, visit habitations. Dance in dust above the floor, ascend on light the sleeping stair. Melt before those yet to come, pity, lead and wait here for them.
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Plates
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Interface I - VIII acrylic and charcoal on canvas, 42 x 36 x 2 cms 2016
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Disappearance I, II, III charcoal and acrylic on canvas, 101 x 101 x 5 cms each, 2016
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All things metamorphosise charcoal and acrylic on canvas, 155 x 122 x 5 cms 2016
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The lidded ground flies up . . . charcoal, acrylic and wood on canvas, 184 x 206 x 30 cms 2017
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Our frozen form emerge charcoal and acrylic on canvas, 155 x 122 x 5 cms 2016
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Metomorphases V Mixed media and acrylic on canvas, 170 x 170 x 15 cms 2010
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Cutting I, II Charcoal and acrylic on paper, 103 x 96 cms 2010
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Anna McNay in Conversation with Nick Malone London, 2017
Anna McNay: You started out as a writer and have published a couple of books. At what point did you decide to start making visual art? Nick Malone: I went to art college as a mature student. From a very early age, I’d really wanted to be an artist, but I took my A-Levels too early at 16 and gave in to pressure to go to university rather than art college, as I had an interest in writing as well at the time. So, initially I was a writer and supported myself with an academic career, although I did illustrate my own books. I had some success with the writing, winning prizes and getting some great reviews, and I had the opportunity to travel. I’d always wanted to live abroad for a time and went as a visiting professor to Thessaloniki University in Greece and then Wisconsin University in the States, but that was in the field of contemporary literature, not art. However, the drive to be an artist was so compelling that I decided I had to go to art college. So I gave up everything and went, which, at the time, felt a rather scary thing to do, but I seem to have got away with it. Initially, I got a couple of businesses going to help fund things, which I supplemented with some activity that was very much on the edge.
I do sometimes wonder whether putting myself on the line like that in a rather dangerous way was a kind of atonement for not having stood up for myself at 16, given that I always knew art was what I really wanted. Initially, I went as an undergraduate to St Albans School of Art, on what was then a new degree. The course was great – they tried really hard. Their spiritual home was New York in the 1960s – Jackson Pollock and so on – but they were honest about this and, to be fair, they did invite in visiting lecturers from a very wide range of backgrounds. And they were ambitious in approach, which is a good attitude in art practice. The only drawback, in retrospect, was that their involvement with high modernism prohibited anything that had narrative or could be described as illustrative in any way. So I developed a pronounced sense of depth and possibility in the materials, but a whole side of me that dealt with story and speculation was repressed. It was only later that I learned to combine the two. I had intended to do an MA at the end of the course, but I was approached by galleries before I graduated, and I was tired of getting certificates, so I decided just to get stuck straight into painting.
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Has your work always been mixed media and incorporated words as well as imagery? No. Initially, alongside my involvement with the materiality of the paint, my first serious work emerged out of the cruciform. A lot of my training was very classical – my father was a portrait painter and I spent years working from the model. For a time, I had a studio in the West Country, and the elemental shapes of surrounding prehistoric trilithons somehow merged in my mind with the shape of the model with extended arms. I was very involved in work with the landscape at that time, so the T-shape became a way of organising the picture plane, with the top line of the T becoming the horizon line. It provided a very elemental structure within which to work, but even then I was dealing with ambiguity. A lot of those works are called Marches or Margins. The ‘marches’ in medieval times were a kind of no-man’s land, where you weren’t quite sure where Wales started and England ended. The works were deliberately elusive. Were they marine or terrestrial? Were they dealing with decay or resurgence?
and round in a big circle, so I was forced to change how I worked. And I decided to do that MA after all because I realised that I’d been out of all critical debate for the last 10 years. This time, I studied at Central St Martins, which was then highly theoretical, so I just decided to reinvent myself. I brought in the writing and ideas I’d previously suppressed and moved towards paintings that were non-hierarchic and non-structured, where chance could play a huge role. Was that when you started to pour the paint on to the canvas? Yes. I began doing things that were uncontrollable, putting down bits of wood underneath the canvas, and pouring liquid acrylics from a height to create a 3D landscape – mountains with valleys of paint – and I then intervened with marks and writing. I started to see figures and elements I’d been thinking about for a long time – they were there by chance, but I began to perceive them and pull them out.
Around this time, I also received a grant from Arts Council England to complete a book I’d been This approach formed the basis for the exhibition working on some years previously that engaged in Balkan Earth, which I put on for the British Council different ways, through adventure and poetry, with to celebrate their 50 years in Greece. It led to a very issues that run through all my art practice – an creative vein and a lot of corporate sales. Then I inner mythology operating within a wider context suddenly became aware of the danger of my work of visual dynamics, dissolution and change.* becoming formulaic. I couldn’t see a canvas without painting black lines. I grabbed a manuscript that I’d A few years later, I extended this approach, thrown into the back of a drawer before I went to effectively drawing three-dimensionally in wood art college and wrote the text on the canvas round to create a third space between sculpture and
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drawing. This presents different planes, dissolving and providing ambiguous visual armatures, which allow engagement with these issues in new ways. Where does your interest in ambiguity stem from? Early on, I started corresponding with the writer and critic William Empson. In fact, he wrote the introduction to my first book. When I met him, he was a grand international man of letters who’d changed the course of 20th-century literature with his book Seven Types of Ambiguity. Later on, I transferred some of these ideas from literature to painting, although I didn’t foresee that at the time. I think his approach anticipated deconstruction. You can deconstruct something this way, but you could also do it another way, and so forth. The experience of being influenced by somebody in literature may show now in my general ideas of ambiguity – and, from that, in approaches to change and metamorphosis. Here we are, sensate blobs of jelly in this inchoate cosmos – how do you make sense of it? I don’t know why it’s important to me to do this, but it is. Everything is changing all the time, a life force pushing its way into different forms. Each form has its own identity and is trying to protect that, but then it consumes or dissolves into these other forms as one massive cycle. Bacteria decomposing the tiger corpse, and so on. Everything only exists through ambiguity, metamorphosis and change. It may be seen like this, it may be seen like that, but finally it exists
only as an act of perception – the owl is a flower, the goat is a flame. How did the idea of creating a graphic novel come about? Graham Crowley, a highly significant artist who had been Professor of Painting at the Royal College, suggested it: ‘Why don’t you write a graphic novel about your life?’ At first, I didn’t take him seriously, but, as I thought about it, I realised the genre had changed and was no longer just like Batman and so on. Graham referred me to a graphic novel by Richard McGuire, called Here, which uses the device of windows, to show exactly the same place at different points in time. You can cross timelines and even go back to prehistory. Apparently he got the idea from Microsoft developing Windows. I was attracted to what he was doing. I produced a timeline of my life, but the way that I constructed it was to make it a thriller or detective story, centred on the disappearance of my childhood friend, Makepeace, who personifies that part of us that constantly opens trapdoors of imagination; by cutting windows in the pages, the inner and outer worlds of our life look out to each other through the book. It is a compelling read, and part of me wants to ask you all about it and try to elicit which parts are true and which are invented, but part of me feels that would be too disingenuous, and would also spoil the lasting enjoyment of the story.
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Well, there is a sense in which it is all true. Even the bits that are manifestly not true are true in a metaphorical sense. In a way, therefore, it’s just a trope with which to engage, but, at times, the excitement of the narrative takes over – it’s all true in imagination. Fundamental to everything is that any significant work can cross art forms and allow for endless revisiting and reinterpretation. * Jason Smith’s Nocturnal Opera, published by Cinnamon Press, 2007
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Biography
Nick Malone Nick Malone currently lives and works in London. He was awarded an MA with Distinction in Contemporary Literature at Queen Mary College, London and an MA in Fine Art at Central St. Martins. He has received an Arts Council England Award .
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Selected Exhibitions
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2017
A Tale of Two Lives, Art Bermondsey Project Space, London (Solo) (Catalogue - Anna McNay)
2016
Royal Watercolour Society Contemporary Watercolour Exhibition, London Secret Art Prize, Curious Duke, London
2015
The Zeitgeist Summer Exhibition, Bond House Gallery, London
2014
Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy, London Contemporary Watercolour Competition, Royal Watercolour Society, Bankside Gallery, London Open Exhibition, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
2013
Postcards From My Studio, ACME Project Space, London
2010
Paper Myths: Constructing the Other - Course Sketchbooks, Tate Modern
2008
Passages, SW1 Gallery, London (Solo) (Catalogue - JJ Charlesworth)
2007
Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, Contemporary Art Auction, London
2006
MA Graduation Show, Central St Martins Quick and Dirty, Oxo Tower, Bargehouse Gallery, London 30 x 30, Vertigo Gallery, London
2005
New Work from Cyprus, The Hellenic Centre, London (Solo) Gallery Artists, Vertigo Gallery, London Discord, Temporary Contemporary, London
2004
Contemporary British Painting, EWACC, Tokyo
2003
ArtLONDON, Contemporary Art Fair, London Gallery Artists, Vertigo Gallery, London
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2002
Lost Eidolons, Vertigo Gallery, London (Solo) British Painting Now, Arts Council Gallery, Idaho, USA Drawing, Vertigo Gallery, London Byte - New Digital Work, The Media Centre, London
2001
Chamber, e1 Gallery, London (Solo)
2000
Art Paris, Carousel du Louvre, Paris The New Elemental Aesthetic, e1 Gallery, London
1999
Recovering, e1 Gallery, London (Solo) Art 99, London Contemporary Art Fair, Islington, London Vital Art, The Gallery, Clerkenwell, London
1998
New Work, Conningsby Gallery, London (Solo)
1997
Light and Ice, University of Wisconsin, USA (Solo) The Hunting National Art Competition Exhibition, London
1996
Balkan Earth, British Council, Greece (Solo) Dragons on the Move, Raw Gallery, London Stratospherics, Raw Gallery, London
1995
Art in Action, Cornell Buildings, London
1994
The Earth Moved, Raw Gallery, London (Solo) Nick Malone, The Central Exhibition Gallery, Milton Keynes (Solo) Past, Present and Future, Clove Two Gallery, London Midsummer Art Show, Raw Gallery, London
1993
New Work, University of Luton (Solo) Summer Art Exhibition, Central Business Exchange, Milton Keynes
1992
Excavations, The Open University (Solo) Fresh Art, The Design Centre, Islington, London Connecting Lines, The Rietveldt Academy, Amsterdam
1991
New English Art, The Mall Gallery, London
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Selected Writings Jason Smith’s Nocturnal Opera, The Cinnamon Press, 2008 The Song of the Expelled Insects - Prizewinner, The National Poetry Competition The Burial of Crispin Pyke, Introduction by Sir William Empson - The Workshop Press
Selected Collections British Council, Greece One Aldwych Horsham Arts Centre GlaxoSmithKline
Granville Holdings University of Wisconsin I Hennig & Co Brokers Tradition Financial Services
West LB BUPA Manches LLP RAC
Awards Arts Council England Award Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
Bibliography JJ Charlesworth, Passages, Catalogue, SW1 Gallery, 2008 Selected Letters of William Empson, (ed John Haffenden), OUP, 2006 Brian Sewell, Interview - The Big Art Challenge, Channel Five Television, 2004 Gregory Desjardins, Chamber, Catalogue, e1 Gallery, 2001 Libby Anson, Recovering, Catalogue, e1 Gallery, 1999 Rachel Campbell- Johnston, The Times, Wednesday 19 May 1999, Around The London Galleries Contemporary Art, Volume Two, Libby Anson, New Work by Nick Malone, pp 71-72
Teaching Experience Visiting Professor in Contemporary Literature - University of Wisconsin, USA - 1995 / 1996 Visiting Professor in Modern Literature - Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece - 1994 / 1995 Erasmus Co-ordinator for European Student Exchange - 1992 / 1997 Course Director / Principal Lecturer - 1988 / 1997 BA Humanities Degree Course - University of Luton website: www.nickmalone.com
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Nick Malone A Tale of Two Lives Art Bermondsey Project Space 14 - 26 March 2017
CREDITS Text © Anna McNay Images © Nick Malone Design Silvia Maietta Photography Ron Sills Soundscape Chris Dunn Installation Livlans Printed in England by State Media Ltd Vellum Building Bermondsey Street London SE1 3UW
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