Nick Dawes
Since 1998, Nick Dawes has employed a system of self imposed rules to navigate and structure the activity of making a painting. The idea originally was to set a limitation on choice, make as few decisions as possible and act upon only those that were absolutely necessary. By amalgamating process painting with found objects Dawes is able to physically and conceptually subvert their formal and functional status, maximise the tension between order and chance, neutralise the opposition between expression and detachment, stress and remove touch simultaneously, while at the same time collide utilitarian mass culture and high modernist abstraction within a single gesture.