Artist Profile: Nic Moon
Nic Moon graduated with an MFA from RMIT University Melbourne in 2002, and a BFA Canterbury University 1990. Her work employs developments of the modern industial age, using objects like large 3 metre long, commercial-scale saw blades, and turning them on themselves. As she sets to work on them with a plasma cutter they become the victims of their own function. By cutting into the saw blades she transforms them into decorative objects with a serious message. Hers is a comment on deforestation and the impact of her material on the environment.
Over the course of a decade, Nic Moon has established a reputation for the formal and classic beauty of her paintings, sculpture and photography, a much welcomed return to elegance within contemporary New Zealand art. But the beauty of her work is not skin deep. Her technical finesse and appeal to the senses is a ruse meant to lead the viewer into a maze of troubling concerns. This subversive strategy is however, both a reflection of the artist’s conceptual processes and a necessary foil. For Nic is driven by a need to get beneath the surface of things, to peel back the layers of an often rotten core.
At a simple level, Nic’s work is a response to her environment. For ten years, she lived as an isolated artist in St Arnaud on the edge of the Nelson Lakes National Park. Immersed in native bush, she became totally attuned to the environment and acutely aware of the conditions of her survival. She learnt to read the environment, to understand its delicate ecology and know her place within that ecosystem. Most importantly however, she learnt how to turn off the static in her head – the noise of her Auckland childhood – in order to be a perfectly still observer to the world around her.
This is Nic Moon’s first time exhibiting at headland SCULPTURE ON THE GULF, and we look forward to seeing her unique style take shape on the island.
Bio thanks to http://www.whitespace.co.nz/
Tags: Artist, Nic Moon, Sculpture on the Gulf
