Nicholas Winter

The series “Condition” captures the stillness of night but also leads us to questions regarding what it could be interpreted as. The night, emptiness, a lack of people, used as a metaphor for being shut out, shunned, excluded from something. 
That “something”, as an “event”, is not relevant but the work intends to have the viewer imagine how it could be, to be ostracised. The work plays with the idea of capturing a psychological state, a feeling felt due to conditions that are present, a sense of being left out, excluded from something happening somewhere which may, or may not, have personal attachment. Being in a place away from somewhere you think you should be. 

We are surrounded and overwhelmed by the face that pleases or should please. In advertisements, magazines, TV, online and offline, the face is forever present.  We live in a world of the selfie, the faces that please the taker of the image, defining what they believe they look like or should (or could) look like with the purpose of being 'liked'.

In contrast, 'forget not, recollect’, presents a different take on the portrait. Models are sat for an extended period of time, 60-90 seconds, in front of their own image, a reflection in glass. In turn the dynamic of the face that wants to be seen on the outside alters to a deeper more personal 'inner' portrait. It is these inner faces of the subjects that interest.

Through the procedure, the faces stop seeking to please the sitter (subject). Rather they become almost transparent, open, vulnerable, a window into a more personal world.

The experience in the time taken for the portrait is as if the poetical 'I' comes to the surface from behind the outer face; a lightened essence of the person and the 'things' that occupy within. It is as if we look into the portrait, the sitter, to where fear, pain, pleasure, love and loss, and memories dwell. There lies fragility of the 'inner I' below the surface, exposed and laid open with the intention of creating a moment to reflect.

The series of 16 photographs is not a story, nor a moral, or an experience encountered, but an interpretation of a collection of thoughts, a cumulative answer to a sense, unconscious and conscious, in relation to growth.

The work's foundation is a three-way-dialog between a child, themes within fairytales, and an adult. It is a conversation through metaphors, images of ideas, in which there is an element of cautionary awareness being passed on to the child, but more importantly, and concurrently, a personal projection of the desire to shelter, not just the child, but also the adult, in the acceptance that growth is inevitable.

The series “scapes” was an approach towards settling the need for calm. To find space within the hectic of the everyday. A moment of reflection. The images are simply meant to give pause and solace, to let a ‘simple landscape’ have its moment.

The idea to create “space” into these settings by focusing on horizons, lines & patterns and the use of “Chocolate” Polaroid film, allowed me to enhance an abstraction through the colour and sensitivity of the chemical film emulsion, working with the structure of the film to have ‘painted texture’ in  reference to a ‘pictorial’ era of landscape art.