andrew nicholls artwork

andrew nicholls

Andrew Nicholls’ practice is concerned with the sentimental - a cultural sensibility historically aligned with the marginalised, yet one that he feels forms an often-unacknowledged force driving mainstream culture. His drawings comprise a mixture of largely-appropriated imagery and text that he painstakingly reproduces by hand in ink pen. These include elements drawn from Victorian scrapbooks and children’s book illustrations, postcards and souvenirs, 1960s teenybopper pop songs, china patterns and Internet pornography.

He states, “As a white Australian, I am an introduced species in my own homeland, making distinctions between ‘authentic’ and ‘artificial’ subjectivity irrelevant. Yet this distinction continues to obsess mainstream Australia. My ethical response to this incongruence is to privilege the fake over the genuine and kitsch over good taste.”