Nicola Hilditch-Short
My work is about questioning normalities, breaking the status quo and seeking the misplace. It is about encouraging the individual narrative and a breaking out of the way in which the city and modernity control our lives through distraction and fear. It is about promoting discovery and exploration of our cities, our worlds and our potentials. My work speaks about taking the side street instead of the high street and discovering the real city for yourself, in taking your own journey and making your own interpretations. Of seeing the richness of textures, faded memories and lost messages which the modern metropolis censors. In getting lost on purpose and the authenticity of individual experience, rejecting the hand holding of modernity both home and abroad. It is also about the idea of risk taking and the safety net we are encouraged to invest our time and lives into. In exposing the fragility of that safety net and it's fraudulent nature. I explore places such as derelict factories and mills, once the epitome of the everyday entrapment they become our escape from it. These modern ruins existing behind the façade of the modern city, being real and yet not part of reality. Transformed from the banal grind of existence into spaces of uncanny serenity within the flux of the city. Rushed past in the haze of distraction, or investigated as the entrance to a lost world of possibilities, a passage way to another space of existence outside of normality and the start of a journey of escape.
