Nicole Coson

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Aura Within

Hauser & Wirth, Hong Kong

2025

Nicole Coson takes familiar objects – window blinds, oyster shells, fruit crates – and turns them in her hands, holds them to her ear, casts them in metal or crushes them under a printing press, and then lets them go. Her practice works with these things, using meticulously considered materials and techniques to see what secrets they might contain, what stories they might tell. The resulting work shimmers between opaque materiality and a mysterious feeling that within every mundane object is something more: a source of value, the depths of history, an essence or identity.

Since 2023, Coson has been using vessels from the global commercial system as accidental woodcuts. To make her 2024 series, ‘Circuits’, for instance, she took plastic fruit crates, dipped them in black ink and pressed them onto grey canvases, covering each picture to create dense grids that resembled circuit boards or a metropolis from above. Her prints embody a structure of potentially endless repetition, thereby calling attention to their own status as exchangeable units and drawing a provocative equivalence between canvases on the gallery wall and containers in a cargo ship.

The works on display at Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong this summer represent Coson’s largest and most ambitious experiments in the expanded field of printmaking so far. This time the ‘woodcut’ is a pair of doors from a used shipping container which she sourced online, covered in identification numbers, scratches and grime, as well as the logo of a Chinese shipping company: markings that hint at the object’s otherwise mysterious former life. She laid the doors across the floor of her east London studio, coated them in thick black pigment, then rubbed sheets of canvas into the metal before the ink dried.

These dynamic three-dimensional objects, designed to be opened and closed, loaded and shipped around the world, are rendered suddenly solid and still by the printing process. Corrugations in the metal, raised bars, knobbly fixings and handles are all crushed into a modernist vocabulary of flat forms – of zigzags, stripes and dots sitting on the same opaque plane. The deep space of the container, along with its history, are excluded from the representation. In Coson’s practice, opacity is a way of critically engaging with the marketisation of her identity as a young Filipino woman and with the role of the artist as another product, packaged and avidly consumed around the world. Audiences long for signs of the artist’s presence, expressive brushstrokes or biographical confessions, and the cold mechanical processes of printmaking offer one way to resist these demands, to exercise a politics of withdrawal.

The scale of the doors, though, necessitates a physicality unprecedented in Coson’s printmaking. With sustained attention, viewers can discern not only the outline of the metal below the fabric but also the movements of Coson’s body climbing on top of it. Some areas are dotted with knee prints, and many of the seemingly solid shapes are in fact criss-crossed with rough marks: the closer you look, the more expressive the images become, like vast charcoal drawings or whole-body monoprints. These new works are energised by a poignant sense of struggle, then, between depth and opacity, expression and blankness.

This struggle is, like the containers themselves, rich with metaphorical potential. On the one hand, it visualises an uncomfortable meeting of two very different kinds of bodily labour – the hyper-visible artistic machismo that usually fills such monumental canvases is confronted with the brutal, often invisible work of people who fuel the trade systems of which these objects are a part. On the other hand, through Coson’s mark making, the container doors become a symbol of the fraught boundary between self and world: it is as if, with her laborious scraping and pressing, she is trying to break through the opaque shield, to access or express an interior space, to carve out a kind of depth or leave some emotional impression. But, despite the pathos of this struggle, despite the feeling that the pictures are shimmering with expressive potential, the doors remain sealed.

- Michael Kurtz