All is not what it seems

through the glass with Nicholas

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Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

John Steinbeck (1902−1968)

Ideas, like rabbits, abound in Nicholas Folland’s art but, in his care, they breed at a more thoughtful pace and hop about a lot less. Rather than having a practice built around a central idea, he has several overlapping interests; there are, however, themes in Folland’s work that he has explored extensively over the last decade and a half. Focusing on sculpture and installation, Folland reconfigures familiar household objects, interior fixtures and whitegoods, and found crystal and glassware into sublime new assemblages, often with a sense of chaotic beauty combined with fragility and tension— small miracles perhaps. With Folland’s art, you need to be prepared to alter initial perceptions, or as author Terry Pratchett proposes, ‘… to believe in things that aren’t true. How else can they become?’¹It is also useful to succumb to the artist’s playfulness and whimsy.

Folland’s wide interests extend to the systems of hypothesising, analysing and recording used to map known and almost-known worlds and, over the last few years, these interests have played out in two large and intriguing installations using found crystal and glassware.²One was a recently commissioned work for ‘Parallel Collisions: 12th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art’ at the Art Gallery of South Australia in early 2012. Several artworks in ‘Parallel Collisions’ performed a kind of trespass, particularly in the old Elder Wing of the Gallery, with strategically placed work by artists such as Jonathan Jones, Tom Nicholson and Rosemary Laing. Positioned with these works in the Wing, Folland’s Untitled (Jump-Up) was the most... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Untitled (Jump-up), 2012. Installation view ‘12th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art’, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Found crystal and glassware, nylon-coated stainless-steel wire, steel, timber.
Courtesy of the artist and Ryan Renshaw, Brisbane. Generously supported by Arts South Australia.

Floe, 2009. Installation view Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide. Domestic crystal glassware, woven nylon thread, dimensions variable. Photography Samstag Museum. Courtesy of the artist and Ryan Renshaw, Brisbane.