Nicole Coson (b. 1992, Manila) is a Filipino artist based in London. She holds an MFA in Painting from the Royal College of Art London. Working in printmaking, video, and sculpture, Coson’s work explores the process of image-making as it pertains to personal memory, history, and material culture. Coson’s printed canvases oscillate delicately between surface and depth: by integrating symbolically-loaded found objects into the etching press, concrete material culture transforms into analog, indexical images through their negative imprint. This imagistic oscillation between pattern, image, and object is embraced by Coson to tell stories of family, society, and coloniality, but never in straight-forward ways: rather, the artist is deeply committed to the aesthetic politics of opacity and by extension, privacy, secrecy, and intimacy. Rather than alluding to a hidden meaning behind her barrier motifs (camouflage patterns, window blinds, woven baskets, food crates), Coson invites us to study them as such—barriers—and the critical potential of visual obfuscation. 

Coson’s work on canvas is supplemented by occasional culinary and publishing projects, such as the ongoing Food Stories: The Silkroad (201?-), where food is explored as a palimpsest of migration histories—of people, spices, and recipes. Coson was featured in Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2020, and has since held solo exhibitions at Silverlens Galleries in Manila, Philippines and Ben Hunter Gallery in London, UK. 

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.