2009
Exhibition preview: Nigel Grimmer, Worksop
Robert Clark
Saturday 20 June 2009
Nigel Grimmer takes the conventions of family album snap photography and gives them a weird twist that is at times amusing and at others faintly unnerving. Here the self-conscious poses, the banal compositions, the suburban settings are infiltrated with the kinds of surrealistic incongruities that one might experience in particularly bizarre or embarrassing dreams. His Roadkill Family Album is a collection of prone portraits of family members dolled up in joke shop animal masks and seemingly abandoned as roadside victims. Grimmer's mother is an owl, his father a frog. His use of plastic masks and dolls imbues the images with a particularly kitsch and almost perverse form of nostalgia. It's as if childhood memories have been inextricably confused with some kind of metamorphic and macabre fairytale.
Harley Gallery, Sun to 16 Aug
Nigel Grimmer - Axis Artist of the Month, May 2009
Selected by Paul Harfleet
Nigel Grimmer's practice is multi-faceted though photography is his main area of expertise. The ongoing 'Roadkill Family Album' is a series of staged photographs taken at a vast array of locations across the globe from Japan to America. The images depict figures in a 'reclined' state, which, ambiguous in nature, seem both mildly amusing and deeply disturbing.
Each model is clothed in modern garb, though all are adorned in a face mask that is based on an animal subject. From fox to frog to dolphin each composition is dominated by a figure apparently collapsed, passed out or dead. The utilisation of the familiar child's face mask as prop is a cunningly efficient cypher that suggests multiple readings that comment on contemporary society's disregard for life both animal and human.
Initially the work reminisces on a child's fascination with dressing up and disguise which evokes a nostalgic series of memories that almost all are familiar with. The tendency to play and perform as a child is universal, an instinctive drive to explore ones forming identity through play. It is this element that seduces the audience into a familiar and playful universe for contemplatation.
However the reality of mostly adults enacting death invites a more serious narrative. These bodies placed in the external world amongst street furniture and urban detritus explore an inbuilt fear of seeming publicly vulnerable. To collapse publicly usually denotes some form of emergency. From road traffic accident to sudden heart attack these images reference a universal fear of catastrophe away from the security of home. Further contemplation of the work becomes an act of social commentary.
The occasional nightscape alludes to a potentially drunken participant collapsed in an urban environment, which could be read as a critique on contemporary society's use of the street, not only as a location of transportation from one place to another but as a backdrop for crime, accident and violence.
The depiction of past violence and its fatal aftermath presents an epilogue to a mysterious drama the viewer is invited to ponder on. With its rich palette and array of backdrops the sustained continuity of the series maintains interest in the work. Though ultimately it's the subtle sense of humour that manages to prevent the work from becoming self-indulgent or evangelical in its motivation.
Paul Harfleet is an artist/curator who recently until recently ran Apartment with Hilary Jack. Post Apartment they will continue their curatorial partnership as 'Harfleet & Jack' working on a variety of exhibitions and events. As an artist Paul Harfleet is continuing to explore The Pansy Project, (2009) an ongoing artwork which involves the planting of pansies at the site of homophobic abuse.
2008
Nigel Grimmer and Eric Gaskell -
Nigel Grimmer takes the stuff of personal and pop obsessions and builds up narratives that are as touching as they are daft. His raw materials include action figures, comic books and trash film stills. Carefully collaged together, these become components of tableaux that are then recorded with digital photography. His Roadkill Family Album (pictured) consists of prints of stretched out humans masked variously as foxes or badgers. Grimmer is good at pop pathos. The accompanying Community Space exhibition The Family Line features paintings, prints and drawings by Eric Gaskell in which old tombstones and census records are composed into semi-abstractions.
Robert Clark
The Guardian Guide pg 37
Saturday January 12th
2007
Headlights shine on dead animals
IT'S not every day someone asks you to put on an animal mask and play dead in the middle of a road. But if it does happen, you must know Nigel Grimmer. The up-and-coming artist has been making this unusual request for the past few years and his friends and family are entirely used to it now. The thing is, Nigel isn't just any old artist. He's a photographer with an eye for the unusual and he's only looking to extend his Roadkill Family Album. Most people may like to take happy, smiling pictures of people they know, but not Nigel. He likes to dress them up as animals and have them slumped by a roadside before he'll even consider snapping away.
Photos from the Roadkill Family Album are currently on display in Southend and, as you can imagine, the 35-year-old has been getting a lot of feedback. You might imagine it's all along the lines of grim by name, grim by nature' but that's not the case. It's quite the opposite, in fact, and Nigel's work is gaining something of a cult following. So what's it all about?
"It's an alternate photo album," he explains. "All the pictures are of my friends and family and they were all taken at the time you'd normally take a photo, like on holiday or outside someone's new house.
"I've just changed the rules a bit. I want people to see my photos and think they're artificial, but I want them to then think their own family albums are artificial.
"Making two people stand with their arms around each other for a picture isn't natural, but we accept poses like that when it comes to photos. It's all about questioning family photography."
Nigel, who hails from Great Yarmouth, started taking pictures for the Roadkill Family Album in 2000, but didn't get round to showing them off until four years later. Since then, Nigel has been bombarded with e-mails from people who "really like my stuff" and has even begun to hold workshops at schools and colleges, where youngsters can recreate his work.
The Southend exhibition is part of Nigel's first UK tour, which will see Roadkill travelling around the country to "get it out of London". It is also the first time all the photographs in the collection have been displayed.
"When you see the images in a gallery, they all do different things," Nigel says. "You can't look at them and say they're all morbid or sad. They're all about different people, different times, different situations and different feelings.
"I like to make my work accessible and there are one or two which everyone thinks are quite poignant. I get a lot of comments about the one called Jo, Hull, 2000, which features a fox lying by the side of the road. Because there is no blood in any of my pictures, the characters, so to speak, don't seem morbid - they just look like they've given up.
"There are some houses in the background of that particular picture and I think a lot of people can familiarise with the environment. The fox looks like a doll which nobody is playing with anymore and she's looking at the camera like she's trapped. I think a lot of people in small suburban towns know the feeling."
The photographs in the Roadkill Family Album have all been shot in different locations and take viewers on a "journey" from the country to the city. They will also be appearing in a book Nigel is currently working on, due for release next year. When asked about how the pictures came about, Nigel "can't quite remember" why he took the first photograph with his mother. However, he admits he's always had a healthy passion for roadkill from a young age, which probably helped.
"My work is the accepted thing in our family," Nigel reveals.
"More and more people are asking me to take their picture and a lot of my friends have children now, who are very interested in what I'm doing.
"At first, I think my family thought it was a bit odd - especially my mum - but she's accepted art is what I do and now she helps me out all the time.
"She's in loads of my work and is my bestseller. On our last couple of holidays, we only took roadkill pictures," he laughs.
Artists generally make a name for themselves by being a bit controversial and judging from his work, Nigel is doing a good job. Thanks to the exhibition, his photography is very much in demand and he has a jam-packed schedule until the end of 2008. Luckily, he believes he could "go on forever" when it comes to the Roadkill Family Album and Nigel plans to add to the collection every few months.
If you ask me, this is just as well, because once word gets around, Nigel Grimmer is going to be huge.
1:13am Sunday 16th December 2007
By Jenny Green, The EchoSnapshot
Roadkill Family Album
Roadkill Family Album is an ongoing project by the artist Nigel Grimmer. Each photograph depicts a member of Grimmer's family, or a close friend, lying, apparently dead, by the side of a road wearing the mask of an animal.
Although explicitly staged events, the images conjure up feelings of abandonment and sorrow within those viewing the pictures. The animals seem to have expired, or to have given up the will to live, but the underlying human presence creates a curious tension.
Helena Drakakis, The Big Issue, Xmas Issue, 2007
To show that it's not just posh people who are artists, Tre and Ghazal are dispatched across London to a council block in Brixton to see the work of Nigel Grimmer. Grimmer's art is more challenging than the others. It's the sort of art you might see if you mistakenly went back to a serial killer's house after a nightclub, mistaking him for "a real dish".
"Ooh, what's this? Are you a photographer?!" you might say, "Sort of," he'd say, "made my mother lie on the road with a rat mask on. Then I took her photo. I call it Road Kill". "Well, this has been lovely," you'd say, "But do you have a minicab number?"
Grace Dent's TV OD, 27th April 2007
Nigel is FABULOUS. He sounds like Alan Carr on a mixture of ecstacy and helium, and has taken photographs of people wearing animal masks and suits pretending to be dead in the road. ..
blog.myspace.com/wivenhoefunnyfarm 28th April 2007
2006
Nigel's Big Night
Desperate longings, missed opportunities, shameful disclosures, dysfunctional families, misunderstandings, loss, failure, confusion, death. Yes, we are at Nigel Grimmer's show at Standpoint, just around the corner from White Cube. Nigel presents all these difficult emotions and awkward psychologies through his increasingly recognisable and charateristic melange of trashy, garish toys, dolls, plastic monsters and other assorted moulded figures and bric-a-brac. I find it tough looking at so much of his work in one go, especially when he always seems such a nice man, always pleasant and polite and beautifully turned out, upbeat and jolly. I guess he puts it all into the work....oh, Heavens, time to get a beer.
It's a busy night. There's a good crowd, some drifting in from White Cube but a good many here for Nigel's work. He is looking happy. He advises me to pick up one of the badges he's had made for the show (Road Kill or Gay Doll - I take an example of each: I just love this kind of ephemera).
I look round a bit further. More Japanese dolls lamenting the pointlessness of their lives, more family members lying dead on the road...
I run into Lisa Penny who is just back from the art fair in Brussels. What else do Lisa and I talk about? Growing up with an artistic temperament. Meaning, my dears, that growing up was a continual battle against letting yourself have fun. While everyone else was out at clubs and parties, having laughs and not caring, I was at home thinking. THINKING. BEING SERIOUS. Listening to SERIOUS MUSIC AND LOOKING AT SERIOUS THINGS. And, quite frankly, it got me nowhere. Nowhere but into a whole bucket of unhappiness. Nowadays I find it much better not to think at all. Consequently, I'm much happier. (That's today's first lesson, children. Learn it well). Back in her day, instead of going out having fun, she was listening to Karen Carpenter. What more can I say? That's a whole bunch of trouble. Songs about desperate longings, missed opportunities, shameful disclosures, dysfunctional families, misunderstandings, loss, failure, confusion, death. Yes, we are at Nigel Grimmer's show at Standpoint.
I suspect, from the excellent work on show here tonight, he spent far too much time being serious too....
Russell Herron, russellherron.blogspot.com 20th April 2006
2000
"One of the most incisive and dynamic artists I've been lucky enough to encounter"
"If his work is sad, it's because it jolts the viewer into a recognition of loss, and precipitates a sense of mourning. We mourn the lives we're encouraged to dream yet may never live: the super heroes we'll never become; the maudlin romances we'll never have; the false love and sentimentality that suffuses our family snapshots but that we'll never really know, and that will always ring false."
Joshua Oppenheimer, filmmaker and writer
This is important and downright funny stuff!
Joanne Lee, lecturer and writer
1998
"It's doubtful that 1998 will produce another artist as sharp and sensational as Nigel Grimmer."
"Grimmer's work highlights how we like to see ourselves, and how it really is."
"Queer genius"
Stewart Who - Time Out
"Has the artist Nigel Grimmer taken leave of his senses?"
"People like Nigel Grimmer should be sent on a one-way trip to? ...I will even let him have my 'Air Miles' vouchers"
Chris Fisher - Pink Paper
"His dead dolls are the most important intervention since Jean Genet"
Gallery comment book for Passing exhibition, Central Saint Martins
Work Reviewed or Reproduced in Journals
2007
•The Telegraph, 14 July, page 5
•Autocar, 2 July, page 12
2006
•AXM, December, page 14
•Attitude, August, page 14
•London Metro, 1 September, page 24
•Midlands What's On, October, page 55
•Birmingham What's On, 7-20 October, page 31
•Time Out, 14-21 June, page 42
•The Pink Paper, 4 May, page 21
2005
•Time Out, 1-8 June, page 109
•The Pink Paper, 26 May, page 13 & 14
2004
•Blast (France) Sept/Oct, page 77-79
•The Guardian Guide, August 14, page 36
•Time Out, 14-21 July, page 96 & 97
•Diva, February, page 15
2003
•Artists Newsletter, June, page 42
1999
•Die Welt (Germany) 10 August, page 15
•Tip (Germany) 5 August, page 64
•Exhibit: A, March, page 56 &57
1998
•Attitude, April, page 8
•Time Out, 22-29 April, page 107
•Time Out, 11-18 February, page 108
•Time Out, 4-11 February, page 38
•Pink Paper, 27 February, page 8
•Pink Paper, 20 February, page 8
•Pink Paper, 13 February, page 8
•Pink Paper, 30 January, cover
Television Appearances
2007
•The Apprentice, BBC1, UK 26 April
