Hugh Nicholson

September – December 2025
Open School East + Online

The Unstable Ground research group unpacked research commissioned as part of our civic programme by artist and researcher Hugh Nicholson. Collected in a fragmentary and poetic publication of the same name, the research explored the central themes of Home is where the garden is: Civic Space, Material and Produce.

The Associates met with Hugh on a fortnightly basis to exchange, discuss and enact elements of the research, entwining Hugh’s proposed starting points and lines of enquiry with their own research, experiences and practices. Together, the group circled around descriptions of Kent as ‘The Garden of England’, and the implications of pastoral stability, prosperity and abundance.

Through its entangled explorations, Unstable Ground asked:

Where is this garden, and who are its owners? What are its histories, its features, its borders and boundaries? Who are its workers? What tools and modes of production are used to manage its materials? What strategies of governance are used to shape its civic spaces? What implications do these techniques have? What unseen impacts do they entail? What functions do they serve? Just what is it that is being cultivated in this garden? And what, in turn, might be cultivated here in the future?

Hugh Nicholson is an artist, writer and publisher based between Nottingham and London. His work examines capital as a mode of crisis management, exploring how its often destructive, pacifying and unevenly distributed effects might be expressed through artistic form. Here, his research often turns to the relationship between financialisation and ecology, considering both the capitalisation of nature and the naturalisation of capital. Drawing on the legacies of conceptual art, artworks often avoid exhibitionary models, employing commissioning, outsourcing, publishing, and appropriation as critical methods for producing catalogues, distributed artworks or frameworks for action.

Recent and forthcoming projects include: a solo exhibition at TG Gallery, Nottingham; a commission for Chaleur Humaine, Art & Industry Triennial, Dunkerque, France; and a three-month Magnetic Residency at the FRAC Grand Large, supported by Fluxus Art Projects. He is co-editor of independent press Moist Books and has written for various art publications
including Art Monthly, Corridor8, The Contemporary Journal and Hospital Rooms.

These sessions are part of OSE’s two-year thematic cycle Home is where the garden is – find more events: openschooleast.org/home-is-associates