Darren Nixon: Painting and Collaboration

Natalie Bradbury

In the first of a two part series, Natalie Bradbury sets out on a walk around Stockport with artist Darren Nixon, during which they discuss the limitations of traditional forms of painting and their shared interest in how small details can change our perception of a place. Their conversation occurs ahead of an exhibition of Nixon’s work, alongside zine collective Shy Bairns, that will be curated by Bradbury and presented at PAPER in Manchester in 2021.

It’s a cold, windy, winter’s Saturday. Under a grey sky on the edge of Stockport town centre, the artist Darren Nixon and I walk down some steps into an open area of land surrounded by overgrown buddleia, in search of a setting in which to put some of his recent work.

We could be in a public park that’s not been maintained for some time, or we could be trespassing on wasteland. A group of people linger in a fenced-off clump of trees, eying us suspiciously; a dog-walker, on the other hand, says an avuncular “hello” that suggests familiarity. Underfoot are vivid blue and orange casings from used fireworks; overhead the dark undercarriage of an airplane passes close-by, en route to nearby Manchester airport. I spot the scrunched remains of at least one blue plastic bag entangled in a bush (since Hilary Jack’s project Turquoise Bag In a Tree (2005-ongoing) elevated these found items to the status of art objects, at the same time as highlighting their environmental implications, I can’t help but notice them). Out of the corner of my eye, I see another flash of orange. Two tangerines have been dropped, standing out against the rough concrete rubble on the ground. They’re perfect and pristine in their unbroken, unopened roundness, in contrast with the neglect of everything around them.

My companion is immediately reminded of a photograph: Crazy Tourist (1991) by Gabriel Orozco. This composition depicts an apparently abandoned outdoor market in a tropical-looking setting; the decaying wooden stalls are empty, save for five oranges, which draw the viewer’s eye in a circle around an otherwise apparently unremarkable scene. Though there’s no indication of how this fruit ended up on a floor in Stockport, Nixon is also reminded of the conceptual artist John Baldessari, who died earlier this year: specifically Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts) (1973), a series of improbable photographs documenting his attempts to align a set of orange balls across (what feels today like) an impossibly blue sky. We’re both aware that these kinds of details can do a lot to alter how a situation is seen in the viewer’s eye and give a new perspective on a place.

As these reference points suggest, Nixon gets a lot from photography and its presentation of the world; he’s interested in the artistic choices made in images such as these. At the core of his practice, however, is painting. Nixon graduated from Manchester Metropolitan University’s Interactive Arts course in 2000 but focused on painting throughout and still thinks of it as his “native language.” He is currently testing out a type of landscape painting wherein objects (usually small sculptures he has made from scrap wood) are carefully placed (by him) in public spaces. These landscapes may help us see our surroundings in a different way, particularly what he describes as “scrubland and bits of land that don’t speak that loudly.”

Though I’ve not visited this exact spot before, it feels deeply familiar. I’ve lived in Stockport for five and a half years, during which time I have spent many hours wandering the town’s hilly streets and passageways by foot in search of new points of interest or inspiration, and an escape from the intensely solitary, inward-focused and single-minded pursuits of writing and academic research. For me, walking provides both a rhythm and a stimulus to thought. Today, I’ve seen how Nixon’s viewpoint of Stockport differs from my own; he’s taken me to places I’d not been drawn towards before, and highlighted things I didn’t know about a town I thought I’d already explored intimately.

We’re standing here because Nixon is looking for potential locations in which to film some of the objects he has created in his studio, a short walk away. Situated in the town’s picturesque Victorian market square, opposite traditional stalls selling useful goods such as fruit, vegetables, clothes and homeware, his studio resembles an artisan’s workshop, piled high with what appear to be offcuts and incidental scraps of wood. Some could be functional objects such as doorstops, whereas others look like children’s building blocks, each painted by Nixon on one side in bright orange, yellow, pastel purple or powder blue.

It’s through what happens next that they are animated and given meaning, by people or by context. These simple wooden bricks lend themselves to being transported around, picked up and handled. Taken from location to location in a wheelie suitcase, Nixon likens the process of placing, arranging and documenting them against a range of backdrops to “sketching in the outdoors,” akin to the more conventional painting routines of carrying a sketchbook or undertaking preparatory studies.

One of the reasons I was first attracted to Nixon’s practice was because his artworks often appear intimately connected with, and take their form from, the situations in which they are created and shown. Over the past five years this has ranged from making work in empty commercial units – including a vast space at the grandiose, gaudy, out-of-town shopping mall that is the Trafford Centre – to a residency at HOME in Manchester city centre. The latter, Coming Soon to Your Screen (2018), involved a presentation of short, performative video works based around multimedia wall drawings made in the foyer areas when the building was closed.

Back in 2017, I visited the University of Salford Art Collection, an archive which contains everything from old-fashioned oil portraits of the university’s chancellors, to experimental 1960s printmaking, to work by recent graduates, to contemporary Chinese and digital art. In the store, I was particularly excited by a then recent commission by Nixon, which aimed to rethink the nature, function and presentation of such collections. Both an intervention and disruption, The Awkward Ambassador (2016) changes shape according to its location. In the university, the piece is intended to be wall-mounted, where it resembles a series of colourful flags protruding from the wall via a wooden framework. When it’s on loan, it’s designed to be shown on the floor. When in storage, it’s broken down into its component parts and spread throughout the collection. “The idea is that it’s trying to insinuate itself into the company of the rest of the collection – it’s trying to make itself smaller and less obtrusive and a bit quieter because there are other pieces that have been there longer that it needs to get onside, or coexist with,” Nixon tells me.

 In spite of his own emphasis on painting, Nixon’s work is often strongly sculptural in its form and almost architectural in its ambition. Among the artists he admires are those who set up situations offering the viewer a choice of active participation, such as the sculptural structures of Thomas Hirschhorn, which provide visitors with the option to regard the work solely as an art object or to stay in the space and use it for learning and thinking. He’s also frequently drawn to Phyllida Barlow and Lubaina Himid, whose practices blur the boundaries between painting, sculpture and installation

One of my earliest encounters with Nixon’s work was in a solo show at Castlefield Gallery in Manchester in 2015 (his proposal was selected by Himid), as part of the organisation’s Launch Pad initiative. Nixon filled the gallery with what he calls “big, expansive objects,” which asserted themselves in the space and engaged the visitor in a close-up encounter with what they were seeing. Composed of wooden parts painted sketchily with details of landscape, narrative or figurative allusions, these installations acted like a stage set for the audience’s imagination. Depending on the day you visited, your experience would have been different: the work relied on being witnessed first-hand in the gallery, rather than through a mediated experience such as a photograph purporting to capture the finished or “flattened, perfect version” of the piece. “I had this notion about the work never really settling in one place, so whatever I made I went in and remade it every day and took it all apart and rebuilt it and reconstructed it and reformulated it,” explains Nixon. “Sometimes you saw it just completely in bits because I’d taken it apart that morning.”

This reflects a shift in Nixon’s practice away from what we might conventionally regard as painting -– the notion of putting paint on canvas or another surface with a fixed, stable result – towards multimedia pieces incorporating not just painting but film, photography and performance. His work poses a challenge to painting, highlighting its limitations and asking questions about what it is capable of.  

Nixon’s brushstrokes are often rough. Though he sometimes incorporates forms symbolic of conventional mountainscapes or seascapes – in some pieces, for example, the sea is represented through rows of curved lines, or the outlines of hills through the most basic of pictorial forms, triangles – these marks and shapes are suggestive rather than literal. “The ways that painting falls short are quite often the starting point for me,” explains Nixon. “Paint cannot deal with movement in the same way that moving can, or space in the same way that sculpture can, or capture a moment in the same way that video or photography can.”

One way of doing this has been to open the process of painting up to collaboration, allowing other voices to speak. Although the basic act of painting remains part of Nixon’s work, what happens to the object after the paint has been applied becomes another component of the ‘painting materials’ at his disposal. “The painting process might be me putting stuff into a space, it might be someone else stepping in, it might be what I’m doing with the editing process,” he explains. “The act of putting paint on the object is not what this is about, it’s about making something that can act as a springboard.” 

Nixon has invited participants with different skillsets to his own to animate and activate his work, as he films from multiple camera perspectives. Sitting in his studio, he shows me recent footage of the choreographer Charlie Morrissey lithely rolling around and interacting with Nixon’s objects on the highly polished floor of Wainsgate Chapel in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire. In a previously unseen film, Nixon has used a split screen to juxtapose footage of Morrissey in the controlled setting of a dance studio with footage of the same objects in outdoor urban settings similar to the ones we visited outside his studio.  

Our meeting today is intended as the beginning of a new collaboration: the ongoing conversations will inform the shape of Nixon’s work at PAPER in autumn 2020. I can’t help but admire his openness. As a writer, there are few prospects I find more daunting than collaboration or relinquishing control. To me, there’s a great deal of bravery in setting out on a path without knowing where it is going, and enabling the outcome of a project to be shaped by the journey taken to get there and the people met along the way rather than a pre-conceived idea about its destination.

Darren Nixon’s work Static is currently on display at the Portico Library in Manchester as part of the group show ‘Talking Sense’, until Tuesday 14 April, and Dislocate (Triptych) is included within the ‘Manchester Open’ at HOME Manchester until Sunday 29 March. A joint exhibition of work by Nixon and Shy Bairns will show at PAPER in 2021.