Nicky Hodge - Shoal

Conceived in Nicky Hodge’s Bristol studio, Shoal began as a small group of found wood pieces. As the idea expanded, new and existing works in lightweight materials and supports, among them watercolour, crayon, felt, netting, card, polyfilla and plastic, were added to the mix. Immediacy and quickness became integral to the process, one small piece giving rise to the next until both walls of the studio were covered.

As a group, these small assemblages contain an inherent fragility. None is anchored to the wall, and the possibility of rearrangement is always present, along with fragmentary motifs that repeatedly come and go across the work as a whole. Not all appear to be swimming in the same direction, and yet a coherence holds them together: a conversation that keeps on coming, a truce that may or may not last.

Shoal is also an archive. It gathers snatches of ideas and fragments of an art practice going back some thirty years, and it sits in relation to Hodge’s expanded painting practice. Part of the intention is to disrupt the purity of painting by excavating and reimagining some of its most basic elements. In this non-hierarchical relationship between materials, anything becomes something and nothing is fixed. These hybrids can change, and change again, in many different ways, and there is a playfulness in that.