Walking Down Rye Lane Drawing

Nicholas Cobb is an artist who exhibits regularly and has been the subject of a number of articles about his working method where he constructs elaborate dioramas which are then photographed from various viewpoints. A number of his Car Park series photographs were exhibited in the Whitechapel Gallery and most recently, at the inaugural Peckham Festivals show in the Copeland Gallery, his 7 metre After Oil diorama caused much interest as in the past the size of the dioramas has meant they were never kept or exhibited. A dystopian anxiety runs through these models and series of photographs. Taking the psycho-spatial critique of the built environment found in J.G. Ballard's late novels as a starting point, Cobb implies a narrative or storyboard by arranging 1:87 scale figures in crowded or intimate scenes which grow ever more disturbing. Essays on his work have appeared in ICON, Photofile and fLIP magazines. His Car Park series [2010] features in the recently published Microworlds [2011] – an international survey of artists using the miniature scale. Cultural critic Mark Dery wrote about his Office Park work, 'Like the yuppie apartment-tower dwellers in David Cronenberg’s Shivers, driven to acts of bacchanalian depravity by a sexually transmitted parasite, or the residents in J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise, whose class war escalates into a Conradian nightmare of atavism, the workers in Nicholas Cobb’s Office Park seem to be possessed by a collective dementia.' Cobb also is interested in working directly in landscape. In particular he has been intrigued by the 19th century French 'plein air' landscape painters reaction to the Western landscape tradition. Using an extraordinary mirror that distorts colour and space he has photographed in Fontainebleau [where the Barbizon school worked], Giverny [where Monet created his waterlily pond and outside Aix-en-Provence [where Cezanne painted].