Nick Maroussas

Nick Maroussas is a mixed-media artist based in South London. His collages explore the boundaries between the man-made and nature, reanimating found materials, shapes and colours, often the by-products of design. New arrangements are constructed by assimilating inherited material and processing with a mechanical mindset. Maroussas suggests these serendipitous compositions hold some inherent value which might offer us a fleeting glimpse of our connection with the world.

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“I’m interested in the structures and the serendipity of where these shapes come from, because I didn't design them, they've just happened."

I spotted on instagram that an artist was throwing away her offcuts; offcuts of rather posh, beautiful paper (Waterford Saunders from St. Cuthberts Mill). So I asked if she would mind sending them to me. A huge bundle arrived in the post which unravelled to fill my, admittedly small, studio floor. There were lots of awkward leftover concave shapes. I decided to restore them to A4-sized panels and from there I could continue with my process as usual. After constructing the first few of these panels, however, I realised that it was the cuts, or seams, that were of interest and that any further embellishment would actually conceal them.Over two months, I worked my way through that whole pile of paper until my bin contained only shavings and I had a neat pile of 52 panels on my desk. I tried to think like a machine, like I was churning out OSB panels. Each piece was positioned, not for its aesthetic merit but for efficiency, to avoid as little cutoff as possible. Colours, wholely the choice of the original artist, were reunited. I would start a panel, on the left, with a larger piece but then offcuts would naturally get smaller and smaller as the panel grew to the right. Some panels became more of a jumble as my stockpile dwindled down to the last few fragments.This project took my work in quite a different direction. Oddly, I don't feel like I had much choice in the matter. That pile of paper compelled me to rebuild it. It was always going to happen, it was just a matter of how quickly I cottoned on.

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selected exhibitions

'A Generous Space', Group Exhibition, Hastings Contemporary, Hastings, Nov 2021 - Apr 2022'Matthew Burrows Selects', Group Exhibition, Unit 1 Gallery I Workshop, Shepherd's Bush, September 2021‘Found Shapes of the Unknowable’, Solo Exhibition, Brother Marcus, Balham, October 2019Creekside Open 2019 Selected by Brian Griffiths and Sacha Craddock, APT Gallery, Deptford, June 2019‘We Can Only Have Fun On Certain Days’, Group Exhibition, Warbling Collective, Tower Hamlets, April 2019Longlisted for Beers London Contemporary Visions 2019‘Let Me Know Before You Arrive’, Group Exhibition, Warbling Collective, Shoreditch, October 2018‘Marching Through The Fields’, Group Exhibition, Warbling Collective, East Dulwich, August 2018Creekside Open 2017 Selected by Jordan Baseman, APT Gallery, Deptford, May 2017‘Junk Mail & Cereal Packets’, Solo Exhibition, Too Many Cooks, Southwark, April 2017