> Biography > C V > Artists Statement > New Work >Animations > Interviews > Links Selected Exhibitions Juncture. Painting from South Africa, 2010 Caveman Spaceman, 2008 Earthlings, 2006 Ends and Escapes, 2005 Pacifier, 2004 Fix, 2003 Hopeful Monsters, 2001 Superhuman, 1999 Momentum, 1998 Continuum, 1997 Window into the South African landscape, 1994 Contact Me

Fix, 2003 (Rhodes University Alumni Gallery, Grahamstown) Nigel Mullins has, in the past, dealt with dislocation in a particularly South African context. He has worked with figurative and landscape imagery, setting the vividness but relative meaninglessness of human experience against the atemporal stolidness of the Eastern Cape environment. During the last four years, however, he has dealt particularly with violence and the effects of violence. One of the major reasons for this shift was the brutal attempted rape and attempted murder of a close friend early in 1999 whose rehabilitation took place in our home over the period of a year. Mullins subsequently produced AnAesthetic for Cruelty and Violence (2000), a strictly composed work made up of 42 small paintings, primarily concerned with the aestheticising of violence: a prerequisite for coping with the overwhelming trauma of its proximity. Fix, 2003, oil paint animation Click on the image to view the animation The dynamic of this exhibition, Fix, is sited in the relentless negotiation between the anarchic and the contained. Violence has mutated into mania and absurdity, its aestheticising to the banality of décor. Many of the characters that Mullins assimilates or invents are particularly dislocated and absurd, most notably Father Xmas and the polar bear: distinctly non-indigenous to South Africa. In The Unreasonable Behaviour of Mr Klaus I & II, (2003), these figures metamorphose into a voracious eroticism. In Polar, (2003), the bear is obsessively repeated, tonally cool and simple in a gently structured grid. It provides solace by detachment, satisfying the desire for idyll through its whimsical otherness. The Unreasonable Behaviour of Mr Klaus, 2004, oil on canvas 165 x 165cm Tic Bite Fever, (2003), refers, as the title suggests, to both an uncontrollable physical manifestation of anxiety as well as to a typically South African disease. Particularly non-South African characters, like the energetic hula dancer and the manic and sexually carnivorous Pac-man, are infected by the red tick, producing anarchy, and riotousness. Hybrid creatures metamorphose, penetrate, jostle for space, ingest, pleasure and regurgitate each other in a disquieting display of eroticism and violence. The underpaint is nacreous, both pretty and visceral, its flickering effect underlying the relentless restlessness of this work. As with Mr Klaus, the element of an anodyne aesthetic (as the banality of wrapping-paper in pinks and lilacs) provokes an initial visual response, sabotaged by its nihilistic content. The continuation of Mullins' concerns about constraint versus insurgence is seen in a different context in Warders, (2003). The impulse for knocking nails into the wooden heads lies in the notion of an apotropaion, or, a warder-off of evil spirits and misfortune. The idea is to appease and feed the spirits by ritual sacrifice. The Warders were made after a period of misfortune in Mullins' life, followed by the birth of his daughter; a state of both vulnerability and the need to protect. Warders, 2003 painted wood, nails and hammer dimensions variable Artist's Statement These heads were created to be the ideal scapegoats. The logic of it is: the more emotionally provocative the objects are, the more loaded the sacrifice, and the more valued the sacrifice, the more effective the appeasement and subsequent protection. The eyes register sadness and alarm, the mouths, fragility and resignation. There is an intense cruelty in the process of violence and ritual killing in which the viewer is invited to knock nails into the heads, because the viewer needs to turn against his or her emotional response, but in doing so there is a measure of satisfaction, even glee. And, in fact, the resulting object is particularly gleeful: a semi-cartoon character with an improbable hairdo and a capacity for constant resurrection. The idea of a fetish continues into the physical and self-referential qualities of paint in Décor: Art for the Diet Conscious, (2003), Random Misfortune as Décor, (2003) Fix, (2003) and the small canvas es. The fetishistic paintmarks are equivalents for the anarchic, which cannot be eliminated, only momentarily suppressed or temporarily deferred. Held within a tightly drawn grid, the marks become 'fixed', or pinned down by nails. These violent vignettes, increasingly disrupting the frames which contain them, are aestheticised by their context in an ironically décor-conscious colour chart. In Décor: Art for the Diet Conscious, Mullins brings lurid and nutritionally empty sweets and toothpaste into the mix, the sensual and sumptuous qualities of oil paint subverted by sensorily disgusting juxtaposition. The possibility of anything pretty or tasty is marred by the constant ritual of perpetrating violence upon it in order to deflect the chance of violence being perpetrated on oneself. Mullins follows through this nihilism to meaninglessness, best seen in Wallpaper, (2002), which is over-saturated and almost entirely self-referential. The residue of violence settles on and transforms our lives on every level, both in the broader South African context and within the experience of the individual. The easiest response for many is insularity: a blinkered deferral of violence. Mullins doesn't ignore his context in an unsettled society. His means of deferral is ironic and often humorous. Pathos appears not as sentimentality but as the result of a sustained engagement with his medium and his social and personal context. Tanya Poole June 2003 Click on the artwork to enlarge it Random Misfortune as Decor, 2004 oil on canvas 165 x 165cm Artist's Statement Panopticon,2004 oil on canvas Private Collection Artist's Statement Mute1, 2004 oil and spraypaint on plastic 69cm diameter Artist's Statement Mute2, 2004 oil and spraypaint on plastic 69cm diameter