Working primarily with analogue printmaking techniques, wool, oil paint and Perspex, Filipino artist Nicole Coson's practice is concerned with possibilities of erasure and simultaneous appearance and concealment, manifested through anthropomorphic abstractions and motifs.
Read MoreCoson's monoprints are the result of a process in which the artist applies a thin coat of black ink to a metal plate and scratches or wipes it off using her fingers and scraps of cloth. The forms evoke semi-abstract figures—often intestinal and ghost- or alien-like—with suggestions of facial features. In Ghosts of Human-likeness #3 (2014), for example, a single eye seems to float in the swirling pool of white, while a silhouette of a humanoid form can be made out in Ghosts of Human-likeness 7 (2014). Ambiguous, her unidentified subjects exist in a state of flux between appearance and disappearance.
The intestinal forms of Coson's monoprints resemble blurred pictures taken by the slip of the hand. In the catalogue for her 2015 solo exhibition How to Appear without a Trace at Display Gallery, London, Coson's monoprints were likened to 'accidental photographs on film'. In a 2015 interview with Moustache Magazine, Coson similarly remarked that she is attracted to printmaking for its unpredictable nature and her subsequent inability to determine the outcome. Her monoprints also evoke Susan Sontag's belief that the camera holds the potential to 'assassinate' the subject; it is as though the works entrap the essence or spirit of a subject within their phantasmal impressions.
In How to Appear without a Trace, Coson presented a series of untitled works made using Perspex and wool. Each artwork, mounted on the wall, comprised three sheets of Perspex tinted in different shades of blue, between which the artist placed small or long sections of twisted wool to appear as though floating. Compared to her monoprints, where traces of representation remain, these works were deliberately more ambiguous in their lack of title and elimination of the figurative.
In her solo exhibition Camouflage (2017) and group exhibition Painting, Differently (2018) at Silverlens in Manila, Coson considered the political history of the camouflage print in her series of large-scale black-and-white and multi-chromatic paintings. As relayed in an interview with Metro Style in 2017, the artist was drawn to the pattern for its association with American soldiers in the Philippines when they replaced their blue uniforms with camouflage uniforms during the Philippine Revolution (1896–1898). By virtue of its ability to blend its wearers into the landscape, camouflage served not only as a necessary means of defence for Americans but also as a strategy to normalise the presence of the coloniser.
Coson graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins in 2014 and is currently completing a master's degree in Painting from the Royal College of Art. She was nominated for the 2014 Saatchi New Sensations Award.
Coson lives and works in London and Manila.
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2018
