Nicholas Wilkins – Atmospheric Flow

As we sit above clouds in an airplane cabin, or while we wait within the interior of a stark terminal building, contextual cues usually available to determine place – street names, flora, fauna, architecture and the like – do not exist. Instead we are enveloped by a uniform world of concrete, glass, metal railings, escalators, x-ray machines, fast food chains and wafts of jet fuel smells. We are momentarily anonymous, existing in a kind of nowhere land, a non-place. It is, as Marc Agué said, “a world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral”. It is these liminal spaces that Nicholas quietly navigates, finding that beyond their surface level banality exists a world of mysterious beauty, of possibility, of memory, longing and loss.

Nicholas Wilkins (b.1991, Jacksonville, USA) is an Australian/American artist and photographer based in Melbourne. He studied Arts and Visual Arts at Monash University, graduating in 2014. He has held solo exhibitions in Melbourne including Habitats (2016), Distance (2017), and Atmospheric Flow (2021), all of which see him investigating urban environments and infrastructure. In addition to his art practice he works on commissions for clients in the fields of architecture, fashion and furniture design.