Judo-House Pt. 6 (the white bird) is an attempt to illuminate interdependent threads that connect things in the world such as creatures, objects, sounds and image, with the internal landscape of the human psyche. Themes of pain and joy, loneliness and hope, life and death are explored.

The work in Judo-House pt. 6 (the white bird) cannot be easily explained, it is instead the viewer who plays the most important role in shaping the works’ meaning. The viewer, through activating his or her own memory and own abstract associations with the work create its narrative.

In his first show at The Lock-Up, Nigel Milsom will present a new video work and installation works alongside a new series of paintings.

“Although primarily a painter I also work with video, photography, ink drawings, pencil drawings and sculpture. The subject matter in my work varies from one body of work to next. The choice of medium used in any given work is usually determined by the subject matter. Because I’m lazy I like to work with materials that best suit transcribing my ideas. Exerting my will in a laborious manner with the materials chosen is something I endeavor to avoid. Oil paint as a substance has its own inherent beauty so why mess with it. Sometimes I paint in an expressionistic style and on other occasions I may adopt a more hard-edged technique. I like to reduce the pictorial element in my work to the essential. Sometimes I’ll indulge in detailed descriptions of latent characteristics of things I see and experience from my everyday environment.”

– Nigel Milsom 2016

ABOUT NIGEL MILSOM
Award winning artist Nigel Milsom completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts at the University of Newcastle in 1998, then postgraduate studies at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW gaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) in 1999 followed by Master of Fine Arts in 2002. His work features in multiple collections in Australian and overseas, notably the MCA and Art Gallery of NSW. He won the Fisher’s Ghost Open Painting Prize in 2008 and was a finalist in the 2010 and 2012 Archibald Prize and winner of the Doug Moran Portrait Prize in 2013. In 2015 he won the prestigious Archibald Prize with his portrait of barrister Charles Waterstreet. Nigel currently lives and works in Newcastle NSW.