Steve Wickham

Level 7

2023

Fundamentally I am a musician. My practice is eclectic and includes disciplines of music, film, animation painting drawing and printmaking. I feel the need for these broad range of disciplines to articulate ideas, think of different voices in a choir. There is also a feeling of order from Chaos.

My process begins with listening and trying to be in the now. I then try to give voice to any ideas that might arrive. They might be musical, textual or visual. There is joy or fulfilment for me in manifesting an idea successfully. Time is a dimension of my work. The passing of time, a moment in time, recording time. In many respects this comes back to the challenge of being present as much as possible.

I Consider myself a Nauist, this is my manifesto. Nauists sit at a nexus, neither futurist nor retrospective adding weight to the gravity of now. The Nau is weightless, and like Kandinsky’s point, it leads to a line which leads to art which leads to intelligence. The singularity of the present regards all previous points as historical. For Nauists, a future is known and therefore considered when exploring the present. Near past and near future are implicit in the Nau. Everything comes from the Nau. The Nau is never what it used to be. We share the Nau. Among the many artists I admire are David Bowie, J S Bach, Nina Simone, Alfred Hitchcock, Käthe Kollwitz, Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Chagal Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Goya.