This Weeks' Artist of The Week Winner is Nicolas William Hughes!

Nicolas Willam Hughes deals with the contemporary relationship between man and nature and contemporary anthropology. Intrigued by the exponential growth of population and the ongoing shift to urban environments he explores notions of our changing society and self developed post-culture fictions using photography, video, installation, performance and participatory projects..

Hughes believes that within the Global mindset we are all trying to cling onto our own sense of cultural heritage, be this from the country/city or province we grew up in, our religious views, our class values, our historical roots or stories that we pick up on the way. Often this work uses humor to emphasize Hughes' view of the importance of the approachability of contemporary art. This approach often proves to create works that can be interesting and engaging to everybody and not only the creative and academic.

Hughes usually begins the process of his practice with personal reactions to the environment around him leading him to academic, non-academic and artistic research usually worked on in a playful manner. Often Hughes undertakes participatory-based research projects to inform and inspire his personal practice, which leads to the ultimate creation of work. His key interest is in the immediacy of lens based media, although his practice has diversified to a vast amount of different mediums.

Conversations with Birds Participatory Project, 2010, Video, HD 1080p, 8mins
All birds like humans have regional dialect. In fact birds regional dialect is more defined than our own, to the point that birds from different areas of the same country can not understand each other.
This project aims to query the relationship between mans understanding of birds utterances, but also the crossing of regional dialects.
4 of the most common European birds were chosen as examples and individuals were shown an illustration of each bird and asked to utter the sound of each bird as they understand it.




One word to describe you?

Absurd

Your favourite place to visit?

the beaches and woods of South Gower, South Wales.

What's it like talking to birds?

Depends which bird,

Robins are overtly territorial so playing robin song makes them agitated, they puff them selfs up ready for a fight nothing like the cute bird that adorn our christmas cards.

Starlings are hard because they are mimics so simply recording them and playing their song back does not always work.

JackDaws are great because they have such a vast array of utterances their particularly chatty towards the end of the day.

sometimes no birds want to chat I suppose much like bird watching its a waiting game,

Have you got any exhibitions on the cards?

I am awaiting feedback from a few galleries and I have a show coming up next month with 8week Gallery in Bristol.

What makes your practice unique?

To be honest in a world of 7billion people it is hard to be unique, But I guess the mixture of both academic and non academic research and the notion of absurdity that is prevalent in my work is what makes it unique.

Top three galleries?

Mission Gallery, Swansea

Arlofini, Bristol

Debut Contemporary, Notting Hill, London

Do you have advice for emerging artists like yourself?

If you love what you do it should be the driving force behind your practice. Do not be afraid to be wrong and never accept the banal.

Visit www.nicolaswilliamhughes.com for more information.