membership / artist member

Nick Mobbs

http://www.nickmobbs.co.uk
download cv here

Nick Mobbs was featured in Contemporary Art Society's ARTfutures 2007 at Bloomberg SPACE.

I am interested in the ways in which the home can be disturbed by the introduction of something foreign or alien. My work attempts to create uncertainty over the nature or purpose of what confronts the viewer: does the object or space entice or unsettle - pose a threat or offer an invitation?

My practice involves staging scenes and building models in or of the home. I then photograph them and manipulate the image through various printing processes, shifting the image from a photographic record of a model or staged construction to a picture of a possible encounter.

My latest work has grown from investigating kids’ dens. While children build these makeshift tents and forts for play I like the idea that a structure made from cushions and blankets might protect us from fears that the brick walls and locked doors of the house cannot keep at bay. However these dens are also easily subverted, to become lairs, and so harbour the imagined horrors from which we sought to hide. The pictures showing cushions in doorways and windows I see as entrances to ‘the other’. Their vaginal form sits uncomfortably with their child-like method of construction, with the result that they are both threatening and inviting. At the heart of this work is an anxiety, a feeling that we are not secure and our position of safety (physical or emotional) is threatened by some keenly felt but vaguely percieved source.

- Nick Mobbs, 2009

• ARTfutures 2007

  7th March — 12th March 2007
  Bloomberg Space 50 Finsbury Square London EC2A 1HD