Watch Your Coat-Tails

Text: Amelia Stein Images: James Nelson

There is a pattern to life and a pattern to nature, but it takes a solid sense of humour to see the pattern in inanimate objects and frame it amongst these more robust concerns.

Looking at James Nelson’s work, it seems to me that repetitions and disruptions, the banal and the sublime, are of equal importance. Quite unimportant, or at least unspecified, are place and time. These are reduced to the supporting conditions that may have allowed stacks of tires to lean symmetrically against each other in the heat, or bras and knickers to be hung at complimentary angles, or flowers in a planter to cast a certain shadow.

These photographs speak of the way things are insistently never-quite-symmetrical and the happenstance beauty this can create. And if that’s not a profound observation, I don’t know what is.



James Nelson

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