Nat Faulkner

Camden Art Centre is pleased to present London-based artist Nat Faulkner – the 2024 recipient of Camden Art Centre’s Emerging Artist Award at Frieze.

Faulkner was selected for the award for his presentation on Brunette Coleman’s stand at Frieze Focus in 2024. It showcased large-scale analogue photographs alongside sculptural works, that allied the processes of chemistry, environmental factors and time, and one of the central subjects in his practice – the artist’s studio as laboratory and site of discovery.

Faulkner’s studio is rigged for conversion to a dark room, in which he processes his photographic images by hand, the scales of which are determined by the parameters of the space. By changing the settings of the machine (the studio) his approach allows variations to emerge in the work rather than exerting deliberate gestures on the images themselves.

For his first institutional solo show in the UK, the new commission includes a series of metallic frottage reliefs of fragments of his studio walls which are then electroplated with discarded silver – the reclaimed byproduct of Xray procedures in NHS labs. Interested in processes of distillation, purification and the provenance of the material, the works have a 1:1 relationship to the space of his studio, haunting the gallery at Camden, and continuing his approach to photography as primarily a spatial one.