Nicholas McArthur

This Concrete is Rotten is exhibited as part of RCA degree show at the Truman Brewery.

Shot on an iPad, This Concrete is Rotten is a two-part film and accompanying installation. The films follow a solitary character (played by the artist) on a hectic journey through a city.

Disoriented and confused, he appears to be fleeing from someone or something. As he runs, crawls, and stumbles over the dispirited cityscape, he sinks into a chaos in which the borders between the real and imagined start to crumble.

In the second film, the delusions of the character spill over into the physical world in the form of a giant wall monster. This strange entity offers a cryptic solution to the character's dilemma. Finally, in an effort to make sense of his situation, the character sings to camera in a scene reminiscent of a Disney musical.

The accompanying installation offers further context to the work. Wonky PVC panels and the misshapen papier mâché head look provisional and homemade as if it might have been created by the character whilst ugly salvaged furniture and cartoon rugs help pull the viewer into the world of the films.

Viewers of this piece are invited to sit and watch the first part of the film on one side of the installation before moving to the adjacent side to watch part 2. 

In The Breathing Machine, (2022) an oddball inventor demonstrates his creation, a machine with lungs that can breathe mounted upon a child's pushchair the contraption seems to transform the possibly noxious air into a cacophony of sonic howls. Wearing his tech, he attempts to navigate this strange sound with his movements and gestures. 

The film is exhibited alongside the device.

'Turning into the City' is a video monologue. Through fractured sentences, the speaker reflects on the experience of inhabiting the city. from their words, we gain a sense of the character's oblique preoccupation with the metropolis. His tone is introspective and intense as he speaks confidentially to the camera.  The accompanying sound for this piece mixes ambient city noise and electronic music, which adds to the immersive quality of the monologue. 

This two-part film features a lone character who leads the viewer on a journey through the wastelands of the city. Using a strange, homemade device similar to a metal detector, he can tune into the voices of the trash. It seems that the frequency of this instrument is important, as the man is occupied with adjusting and twiddling his machine as it issues a range of sonic howls.

Moving through brownfield sites, industrial complexes, and domestic fly-tips, we meet a variety of odd-ball objects that, by way of the device, spill their stories.

In part two, a giant elephant teddy tells us of its feelings of abandonment upon losing Dad, a rain-soaked jacket speaks about its own incomprehensible disappearance in KFC, and a mobile phone laments the day "the man took me". These stories combine to create a fractured narrative or poem that speaks to the fate of all things thrown in the bin.

The two films employ stylistic approaches reminiscent of the kind of do-it-yourself, homespun videos you find on YouTube. The character speaks directly to the camera. He is not being filmed but rather films himself, switching between tripod and handheld shots, often walking indirectly after pressing 'record'.

Nicholas McArthur's 2D works adopt a similarly unstudied provisional approach to that of his installation and video pieces. The drawings displayed here relate specifically to his film work. They are both a form of preparation as well as being artworks in their own right. McArthur's drawings are characterised by their loose, gestural quality and their use of bold, graphic lines. They offer a glimpse into the artist's process and provide insight into the development of his larger-scale projects.