Nicholas Mangan is one of the most respected and internationally active artists working in Australia at the moment. With a practice with an emphasis on rigourous research and manifesting in sculpture, video, installation, photography and assemblage, his work reflects upon humankind’s relationship to the natural world and the manner in which nature has been both monetised in terms of resources, and has acted as an instrument of economic transfer and value equilibrity. Nick has exhibited extensively over the past two decades, with major recent exhibitions including Limits to Growth, Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2017); Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; and Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2016); Ancient Lights, Labor, Mexico City (2016); and Chisenhale Gallery, London (2015); Other Currents, Artspace, Sydney (2016); Some Kind of Duration, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne (2012); and Between a rock and a hard place, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2009). His work has also been included in many important group exhibitions and biennales including the 21st Biennale of Sydney (2018); The National 2017: New Australian Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2017); SeMA Biennale, Mediacity Seoul (2016); 11th Gwangju Biennale: the Eighth Climate (What Does Art Do?) (2016); New Museum Triennial: Surround Audience, New York City (2015); Art in the age of… Witte de With, Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2015); 13th Istanbul Biennial: Mom, am I a barbarian? (2013); 2010 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Before and After Science; and TarraWarra Biennial 2008: Lost and Found, an Archaeology of the Present.
Nick was a studio artist at Gertrude from 2001 – 2003 and has contributed and participated in numerous exhibitions since this time, with solo exhibitions including Misplaced/Displayed Mass – A1 Southwest Stone, Studio 12 (2008); The Colony (2005); and The Obolus, Studio 12, (2002); as well as presenting works in Octopus 14: Nothing Beside Remains (2014); and in the final exhibition in Gertrude’s former location in Fitzroy, The End of Time. The Beginning of Time (2017).
Mark Feary: I have been following your work since one of your early solo exhibitions, OBTX4Plastralwallmold, at Penthouse and Pavement in Carlton in 2001, and have seen a number of very significant shifts in your practice over this time. In your practice, there was quite an emphasis on formal and material exploration, with the work being very embedded within the actual making of the work and producing a kind of planned execution. How would you suggest these concerns have shifted over time?
Nicholas Mangan: The concerns in the work, the boarder arch concerning human engagement with the natural word, its manipulation and exploitation has remained, what has shifted is the attempt to understand the complexity and conflicts that are present in the materials and events that I seek to unpack. It’s certainly not something I think I have resolved and it’s an ongoing process, a process which continually reshapes the outcomes of the work, both in what is produced and an attempt to better understand and respond to the context of where is it situated.
MF: I recall you did a residency at Berlin in around 2007 / 2008, and thereafter, I felt there was quite a marked change in your practice in terms of its underpinning research and materiality. As your first residency of significance away of Melbourne, and studying in a German post-graduate institution, would it be a fair suggestion that this period was one that had a transformational impact on your work and thinking?
NM: I think this time was an important moment to step back from what I was doing, which until then, had been focused on material investigations deployed through the singular sculptural object, and until this point the production of the work was also physically laborious. It gave me an opportunity to pause long enough so that when I did start again I found I was able re-orientate the direction and approach to my practice rather than continuing to flog a dead horse, so to speak. I was really looking for a way to open the work up to bring more of the circumstances that led to the significance of the materials, objects and events I was investigating, I was trying to find a way to capture the boarder narratives that they were involved in. I was enrolled as a guest student at the Universität der Künste Berlin, which proved to be a productive situation, after a while I stopped going, and around this time I befriended some of the students that were down at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt who had studied in the class of Simon Starling as well as meeting New Zealand artist Michael Stevenson, who had been living in Berlin for some time. I had been interested in Michael’s work remotely, but through our conversations and helping out a bit with his work, I learnt a lot in terms of practice-driven investigation. Ultimately, although Europe was totally transformative in terms of the kinds of practices I was exposed to, I didn’t feel a deep enough connection to European history or even the more immediate local art world zeitgeists, but rather, felt a pull back towards Australia and the complex and fraught historic narratives that had been forged both with our neighboring islands and internally, the residual and ongoing effects of colonial occupation.
MF: Is there a previous project of yours that you have particular fondness for?
NM: Nauru, Notes from a Cretaceous World (2009-10) was the first project I engaged in when I returned to Melbourne after living in Europe. With many of the things I had learned while in Berlin, I wanted to adapt them to a local context. In the case of Nauru it was a historical narrative that was stranger that any fiction could conjure where the site and place presented a series of ready-made expanded sculptural situations produced by social conditions which would became the material for the work. I couldn’t just go out and buy the materials needed to make the work, rather it involved protracted conversations and negotiating, a lot of unlearning and the almost impossible task of obtaining a visa to travel to Nauru. I traveled to the island twice to film, as well as freighting a coral limestone rock back to Melbourne which was almost confiscated by customs. Further to this I used one of the limestone pinnacles that had been originally shipped from Nauru that was mounted in the forecourt of the Nauru House high-rise at 80 Collins Street in Melbourne. Through my research, I had learned that the then president of Nauru, Bernard Dowiyogo, while in America seeking medical support for diabetes had been quoted by a journalist as stating that he planned to save the island from immanent bankruptcy by using the millions of coral pinnacles that were exposed due to the strip mining of the island, and turn these pinnacles into ancient coral coffee tables. Dowiyogo passed away before such a project could be completed and the pinnacles that had once adorned the entry court of the Nauru House where removed when the building had to be sold as the country had defaulted on a serious loan. I feared they had been send to the tip, after a lot of detective work I learnt that the pinnacles had been in fact moved to the backyard of Nauru’s former spokesperson in Flinders. Then I explained to her my idea to complete Dowiyogo’s project to make coffee tables. Though the action of transforming one these pinnacles into an ancient coral coffee table, slicing through its material I felt I was somehow entering into the history of Nauru and participating in the telling of its story.
MF: Your recent project at Sutton Gallery, Termite Economies, is something of a rare return to sculptural making on your part, vastly different in material form to recent projects such as Ancient Lights (2015) and other works unpacking Yap currencies and their histories and connection points to trade, exchange and current cryptocurrencies. What has been like for you to work on this project, as one of quite material form, albeit perhaps not sculpted by you directly insofar as its use of 3D printing?
NM: The ideas that became bound up in the sculptural forms of Termite Economies came out of thinking about the future of labour, and about capitalism’s desire for just about anything to work. I had originally attempted to make the termite architectures myself but there was something jarring in that process, it needed to be a labour that wasn’t human. The 3D printing process was interesting to me as it was a way of building something from the ground up, an accretive topology, I was attempting to conjure a space that existed in-between the organic and digital. I felt this desire to return to object-making after pushing on the limits of dematerialisation in previous works, ultimately for me my broader project is about how ideas, ideologies and narratives become embeded in physical things or about how much of the virtual is still very anchored or indebted to the physical world in order to exist. I was thinking of the forms produced for Termite Economies as termite trainingcentres, mental mappings or cognitive mining diagrams.
MF: You’ve forged an impressive exhibition history to date, exhibiting extensively internationally. What are some of the benefits of continuing to be based in Australia?
NM: I found the international scene overwhelming in many ways, I think the slowness here somehow works for me, it also definitely has its setbacks, but I’ve been really lucky to have had some great international opportunities and have somehow managed to keep those conversations alive. It’s also really important to have an ongoing local conversation with people who have followed what you do over a long period of time, I also think there are some really great artists and thinkers here in Australia. While it’s a hard moment intermssurviving and sustaining things, it’s also a really exciting moment in terms of conversations and production. The next generation of artists, at least the ones I have had the fortune of working with in a teaching context, are really sophisticated and nuanced in their approach to the world but also the changing conditions of being an artist and I feel energised by this. I also have a young family so apart from the depressing situation that oozes out of Parliament House, it’s a pretty good place to live.
MF: What is coming up for you on the horizon?
NM: Recently I came across an article in the newspaper about a group of scientists based in Australia thathave leased one of first Victorian goldmines in Stawell, 3 hours drive north-west of Melbourne, and are currently building an underground physics laboratory 1000 meters underground in one of the mine tunnels to prospect for dark matter. They will house sophisticated equipment that will attempt to detect light from dark matter, I’ve been thinking of it as a camera obscura for the universe. I’m in the very early stages of thinkinghow I might be able to respond to this.
Nicholas Mangan is represented by Sutton Gallery, Melbourne; LABOR, Mexico City; and Hopkinson Mossman, Aucklandand Wellington.