Nicky Hodge: Touch PaperJul 26 – Aug 23, 2025

Artist Statement: I've always found it difficult to distinguish between a painting and a drawing. I’m drawn to making paintings that use marks in an instinctive, spontaneous way, allowing a brush to go into free fall across the surface of the canvas. Equally, I make drawings that use immediate, expressive marks – a rapid, effortless process that can sometimes only take a few minutes to complete. The media or surfaces the drawings are made on is largely immaterial. What counts is the energy that is apparent in these gestural works – the sense of a line taking itself for a walk (to use Klee’s famous phrase) and the emotional direction this may lead you in.

The drawings for Touch paper have, over time, explored multiple directions. One hallmark of my practice is that I don’t ever revisit the same thing twice; rather, my work makes forays into the unknown. Initially, I made a series of 60 or so A5 drawings that had size as their common denominator, but which quickly developed a sense of playfulness as elemental shapes such as circles, triangles and schematic lines began to emerge. After this, I tried to turn off all conscious thought to allow myself to work intuitively with purely abstract drawings. I often worked in series, sometimes using large sections of brown card as well as smaller pieces of paper, grabbing whatever media was immediately to hand in the studio. I would start each drawing with a mark and then work quickly across the surface – putting mark next to mark – often not quite daring to look, and simply allowing my hand to guide itself.

Reflecting on these works now, what most strikes me is the way in which there is a sense of rightness about these indeterminate images. Some part of this is to do with the confidence of the marks, but there is also a way in which a drawing either sings to me or doesn’t, which is not easy to quantify when so much rests on the unconscious process of its making.