Nicole Coson (b. 1992, Manila, lives and works in London) aims to examine the concept of invisibility, not only as a passive position as a result of erasure, the problematic dichotomisation of culture but also its potential as an effective artistic strategy. Can invisibility be seen not just as a disability but as an advantage or ability? Like the optical survival strategies utilised by both prey and predator in the natural world? Who can benefit from this tactic of concealment and dissimulation and how can one apply these strategies?

In her work, Coson explores the economies of visibility and disappearance in the case of overlooked bodies, invisibility in warfare as tactical countermeasures, and cultural visibility in art. Coson’s work searches for a productive position within invisibility that lends us an opportunity in which we are able to negotiate the terms of our visibility. To vanish and reappear as we please and as necessary to our own personal and artistic objectives, to effectively disappear amongst the grass blades until the very moment we must break that illusion, the very moment when it is time to strike.

Nicole Coson oscillates between conflicting realms exploring the state between presence and absence. Through investigating strategies of visibility and disappearance, Coson wields invisibility as a kind of soft power—malleable, multifarious, and manifested as she sees fit: disappearance as a device.

With careful manipulation of everyday objects, Coson’s practice weaves together the anonymous with the deeply personal. Functioning as architectural interventions of space, her works create environments made of fragments with which she unravels a story and simultaneously refutes it, building the visible and invisible landscape of memory, nostalgia, longing and home.