Niki Gandy is a Staffordshire-based interdisciplinary artist, fusing elements of film, photography, ambient light and drawing practices in order to conduct meditative inquiries into the human constructs of, and intrinsic links between space, place and time as sensory and highly subjective perceptions.
Photographic image, still, moving or both is combined with heavily burnished graphite, layered repeatedly to achieve a variety of subtle marks visible only under certain lighting conditions, revealing themselves as ambient light passes across the surface as evidence or documentation of a fixed period of time and labour.
Inspired by the Zen philosophy of Ichigo Ichie, that one must embrace this very moment, unburdened by experiences of the past or the uncertainties of the future, her work commemorates the futility of the human preoccupation with the need to preserve or reclaim time, examining the paradox of the present having already become the past. This concept is underpinned by themes of melancholia and nostalgia in its truest sense, a homesickness for a home (or moment) that no longer exists.
Gandy’s work emerges from the epicentre of a period of life-altering loss and a deep-seated longing for a prior existence, revisiting, undoing and reconstructing nondescript domestic moments in a bid to overcome the frustrations of our limitations in time and memory.
Photographic image, still, moving or both is combined with heavily burnished graphite, layered repeatedly to achieve a variety of subtle marks visible only under certain lighting conditions, revealing themselves as ambient light passes across the surface as evidence or documentation of a fixed period of time and labour.
Inspired by the Zen philosophy of Ichigo Ichie, that one must embrace this very moment, unburdened by experiences of the past or the uncertainties of the future, her work commemorates the futility of the human preoccupation with the need to preserve or reclaim time, examining the paradox of the present having already become the past. This concept is underpinned by themes of melancholia and nostalgia in its truest sense, a homesickness for a home (or moment) that no longer exists.
Gandy’s work emerges from the epicentre of a period of life-altering loss and a deep-seated longing for a prior existence, revisiting, undoing and reconstructing nondescript domestic moments in a bid to overcome the frustrations of our limitations in time and memory.