The latest work by John Nicol is closely connected to the issues and themes that have occupied the artist in the past. These are the public/private issues of sign, shape, narrative, myth, bicultural language and individuation away from traditional painted formats. These issues are consistent within this new work, and yet there is a point of difference here. The work in fabrications 04/05 reveals a further degree of abstraction - a single minded and pared-back approach to the development of form and image. There is a sense of summary whereby previous themes have been consolidated.

The painted forms inhabit the border between sculpture and painting. As much as they are paintings of sea and land scapes, they are also emblems and talismans that hang in the wall space, window-like. They have the gentle aspect of ‘naïve’ craft objects that are made because of an inner impulse to create and to repeat – a meditation of sorts. This private agenda mixes with the artist’s interest in working out and resolving the objective formal concerns, which are also clearly apparent in the work.

Nicol’s works are arranged as if on the pages of a book. They create a language of metaphors where emblems and spaces speak implicitly. The simplicity of the shapes connects the work to children’s story books or indigenous mythmaking, and it is this simplicity (the essentialisation of forms and the increasing paring back) that directs the viewer to Nicol’s fine grasp on the semiotics of shape as well as the purity within his depiction of painted sea and land scapes. This work is tinted with nostalgia, but the signs point the way forward as well.