Nic Phillipson, ARTICLE I, 2023

The genesis of this work stems back to 2006, the final year of my Bachelor of Fine Arts study in New Zealand. Before I had considered gilding as my preferred art-making technique, I started envisioning an elaborate body of work using animals as metaphors to comment on society; George Orwell’s Animal Farm was one of the most impactful books I read in my younger years and his allegorical use of animalian characters has had ongoing resonance. I still hope to create those initial planned artworks at some point, if circumstances allow.

One work in particular was based on a shark; like many I have held a lifelong fascination with sharks, mine grounded in childhood fear. Formed through a combination of an anxious disposition and watching JAWS at too young an age; I spent several of my younger years living in a harbourside suburb in Auckland, New Zealand, irrationally dreading the water and the omnipresent threat I deemed within. That fear has gradually evolved into a respect and admiration of these amazing creatures (although I’m never fully comfortable swimming in the ocean to this day).

As a teenager I started to develop an interest in sculpture and, no doubt driven by my childhood angst, I was greatly influenced by The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a Damien Hirst sculpture featuring a suspended Tiger Shark preserved in a formaldehyde-filled display case. So I see Article I as homage to Hirst (and Jeff Koons, whose sculptures also had significant influence on my art practice).

I started wanting to explore gilding circa 2010 and around 2012-2013 I decided a Great White Shark jaw would be an interesting object to cover in gold leaf. Finding that it was in fact illegal to purchase an actual jaw, I was fortunate to discover an amazing resin replica, cast from the jaw of a 6m (18 ft) shark, and decided that was what I would gild. It was from that point I began a 10 year journey that the film industry would characterise as “development hell”, a tug of war between the competing life challenges of money and time.

For the initial years I was in a lowly paying job in Sydney, consistently rated as one of the world’s most expensive cities to reside in. Living paycheck to paycheck, there was simply no way I could afford gilding tuition, let alone the jaw and the gold leaf required to complete the work. So this artwork spent several years as simply a fantasy, I spent many hours wondering if I would ever turn it into fruition, all the while enduring a requisite but resented day job, to pay the bills.

The passing of my father in 2015 proved to be the catalyst for change; he left some money to be used for travel and I used this to finally fund a gilding course in 2016, in the Italian city of Florence. Returning to Sydney, I spent the next year exploring a few small studies with my new skills (including what is now Article IV). Having progressed to a better paying day job, I was at last able to procure the resin jaw in early 2018.

And so my dream work finally started becoming a reality. For the first few years my studio was the corner of my rented terrace house bedroom, in the central Sydney suburb of Surry Hills. The jaw stared back ominously at me from my easel, the first thing I would wake up to in the morning and last thing I would see at night…probably not the best image to ensure a restful night’s sleep, nor the regular odour of the gilding size (glue) used to adhere the gold leaf. Fortunately a new apartment featured a sunroom which became my studio; cramped and cluttered but a far healthier space to complete the project.

In hindsight this was an overly ambitious first major gilding work; what I thought would be a 6 month long part-time project morphed into a 5 and a half year arduous toil. Finally in a career position where I could finance the work, time now became the issue, working a demanding and difficult day job which often left me with no energy or enthusiasm to indulge my art practice. So it became a very fits and starts project, completed at glacial progress; a spell of gilding was often followed by weeks or months of no activity at all. That and I was completely naive at how complex a shark jaw is as an object; the rows of teeth and surrounding spaces were a huge challenge to gild. In all I would estimate at least 1,500 hours were spent on this work.

I initially conceived Article I as a social commentary, focusing on the theme of consumption which underlies all works in the Manifest series. But the further this work dragged out the more it became autobiographical; representative of the inertia, the sheer difficulty in establishing a career as an artist, the self-consumption I have with that goal and the impact this obsession has had on my being.

At many times I felt I would never get this work finished, but I now look back with a sense of both relief and gratitude for what the process taught me; in-depth understanding of gilding’s technical nuances, fathoming the unique qualities of gold, and the benefits of perseverance. There were many, many mistakes along the way, and the odd gouge out of my skin copping the brunt of a tooth’s point when the jaw accidentally toppled over onto me. But, now completed, I regard it as the most personally significant artwork I have ever created, worth both the mental and occasional physical torment.

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ARTICLE I, 2023

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