Nick Peterson
Statement
Tiger, Tiger, Tiger
After a late night walk in the summer of 2020, I couldn’t bring myself to go home. That’s where all my problems lived, and I had been trapped in the house with them for months. They prowled from room to room like tigers pacing a cage, struggling to reconcile their instinct with their predicament, and in their boredom they would act out their frustrations on me. My problems and I still share space, but at least now I can see through the camouflage of their stripes. It has been helpful conceptualizing them as wild animals whose motivations are as base and primal as they are alien and inscrutable. Here they are, draped across each other.
The Deer Stone
The Deer Stones of Mongolia and Siberia are mysterious monoliths which depict herds of flying deer. The animals abandon the constraints of the material world and join the freedom of the sky as immaterial spirits of the cosmos. What, precisely, ancient humans were trying to communicate here can never fully be known or understood, but I can say that when I am struggling to balance the needs of the material world with the needs of my mind and soul, I find myself fighting a powerful instinct to retreat into obscurity and disappear into something else. We are, all of us, pushed and pulled between these poles.
Bio
Toronto, born 1989
Since 2017 I have studied and worked as a linocut printmaker. Inspired by printmakers past such as Hokusai, William S. Rice, and Harold Nelson alongside other artists like Eyvind Earle and Boris Zvorykin, my work is mostly about the things around me: trees outside my window, the movie I am watching, the seasons of the year, the knick-knacks on my shelves, even dreams and memories and jokes and wishes.
But recently, linocut has become the space I use to understand my thoughts and emotions and formulate the (sometimes) disparate elements of my life into a narrative that I can read and understand. You can design and redesign and iterate and reiterate a thousand different shapes and compositions, but when you find the one you want, and make that first cut into the lino, there’s no great change you can make without completely starting from scratch. It is a practice that reflects the process of my life, and so too helps me make sense of it.
Artist Website: theboywhoprints.ca
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