Nicholas Fer - artist M.A. (R.C.A.)

Nicholas Fer is an artist who has been working on his collage project for the last five years. He uses the technique of collage, which involves cutting and sticking together scraps and fragments, to create his own miniature worlds. The materials he likes to work with come mainly from old magazines and newspapers, especially advertisements and photographic sources that he has collected over the years. He combines images and text, cut out from their original context, and recycles them to make pictures that are often quite abstract. Rather than reflect the world in a straightforward way, they are surreal composites that bring together images and objects in unlikely juxtapositions. Made of paper, they are incredibly fragile but precise composites of the flotsam and jetsom of everyday life, as seen through his own very distinctive artistic vision.

Rather than large gestures, Nicholas Fer has always been more interested in making small work. Working on a small-scale is more intimate, inviting close attention, so you have to peer in to see the intricacy of his paper worlds. A cut or a torn edge takes on unexpected significance, acting as the seam between different realities. Each collage contains fragments or combinations of objects, often creating a figure-like structure. Entirely imaginary, these structures often more like a mechanical apparatus rather than anything resembling an actual body. In one series, fictional monuments suggest great height and even infinite space beyond, showing that scale is always relative (as opposed to size which is measurable). The miniaturization is deliberate and is the opposite of the idea of the grandly monumental. These tiny collages are more like looking through a close-up lens, with the different textures evoking memories of the past. A fragment taken from an old advert harks back to another time that has been lost.

Although small scale, the work often takes a long time to make – as Nicholas often returns to individual collages long after he began them in a constant process of revision. Working in the tradition of Dada artist Kurt Schwitters, the collages are small containers for feelings and memories that cut against the grain of the digital age. This is particularly clear when he deploys ephemera like old advertisements, the kind of materials that are in mass circulation and thought of as throwaway or unwanted trash. Collage becomes a way of salvaging these kinds of fleeting images and giving them a new life through his art practice.

Nicholas Fer began working on this collage project during lockdown and has continued ever since. He works by creating large albums, in which he places his collages as he makes them. He now has a large set of these albums, which are not sketchbooks or diaries as such but an essential part of his working process. At times making the collages has been a daily activity but there are also gaps and intervals of time, when he does very few. Looked at as a totality the albums feel quite episodic, with clusters and groups following very particular preoccupations and obsessions. And yet they have also changed significantly since he began the project over five years ago. From this repository he selects individual works to exist as single works.

Nicholas Fer trained at Brighton School of Art and then at the Royal College of Art in the 1970’s.

Briony Fer