the semi-finalist is: nick wilkinson

5/2/2025

the semi-finalist is: nick wilkinson

Untitled
2025, found wood, found trellis remnant, found metal, flashe
14” x 24” x 1.5”
(photo by Elliott Johnson)

Nick Wilkinson’s studio is in a warehouse adjacent to a storage site for Grow, the native plant nursery that he owns and runs in Los Osos, California. Rather than being formally isolated from his inventory, however, his art space flows seamlessly into his day-job work space. Walking through the nursery, we passed several drought tolerant specimens that Wilkinson quickly identified with both their latin and common names, a blending of the formal and the casual that I have come to see as defining elements of his artistic temperament.
Nick Wilkinson is making work that is both non-narrative and in conversation with the space around it. But first, a quick aside: Last November, I had a chance to see Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350 at The Met in NY. It’s a show that is certainly about painting, but also the blending of skills and materials, surfaces and sensibilities. It is as much about pushing pigment around as it is the complex supports that don’t just present individual saints or scenes, but are part and parcel of them. What struck me about so much of the work in that show was the sense of scale. Nothing was all that big by today’s standards, and yet the altarpieces and portraits felt enormous. The colors, forms, woodwork, and gold all came together to suggest immensity, an awareness felt more deeply because its opposite, intimacy, was also on full display (*see images at end of interview).
Wilkinson’s constructions work in a similar way - minus the overt storytelling - with forms that present as bigger and more grand than the actual square footage of any given piece. Using the opening and closing of wooden lattices and other ready-made supports (see Untitled, 2025), they activate the space around them as they extend their presence. Weathered, humble surfaces allude to a utilitarian past lived under the California sun, while geometric arrangements and buoyant color ground the artist’s restrained visual poetry in the here and now (Untitled, 2025 and Untitled (Web I), 2023). Working outside of singular categories that might otherwise constrain his work, Wilkinson’s fusion of painting, sculpture, and the ready-made tradition show him to be an artist deeply connected to both the history of art and the impulse to simply create.

I'm so happy to be able to share the work of Los Osos, CA based artist Nick Wilkinson in this iteration of The Semi-Finalist. Open, warm, and gracious, he talks about his formative years and about how his studio and process have merged with his daily life.
- David Schell, 2025

The artist in his studio.

The Semi-Finalist: To start things off, can you talk a bit about your formative years and how your life as an artist began to take shape?

Nick Wilkinson: I was born in El Centro, California, a small farming community 2 hours east of San Diego and along the Mexican Border. I don't remember it being a place where the arts were celebrated much, so it wasn't until I moved to Bend, Oregon, my junior year of high school that I began making work. After high school, I moved to San Diego and ended up at San Diego State where I got my degree in painting and printmaking despite really doing a ton of sculpture during my final two years with great mentors like Richard Keely and Walter Cotton. Richard was the sculptor that first opened my eyes to the use of found objects through his work, and as a collector of many different things I was instantly hooked. As I moved out of college and finally to the San Luis Obispo area where I still live, I didn't first find the gallery structure that was open to my installation based work. Without a big studio I focused on growing plants and running my specialty plant nursery, and I built it out like a sculpture while looking at the project as an extension of my practice. It wasn't until a few years ago that I came back to this way of making work and I have really been enjoying it.

Untitled (Detail)
2025, found wood with concrete, found metal, flashe, colored pencil
35” x 1.5” x 5.5”
(photo by Elliott Johnson)

and

Untitled
2024, trellis remnant, flashe, 35” x 7” x 1.5”
(photo by Elliott Johnson)

S-F: A significant part of your aesthetic is tied to a form of alchemy or aesthetic upcycling. How did you land on the “trash to treasure” model for making your work? And do you see it being connected to Arte Povera?

NW: It's funny because until very recently I hadn't really thought about the supports that I weave into this work as trash, but more objects with a history. Unlike Art Povera, my practice steers away from any political meaning and is for me simply a mode of working that is tied to my sensibility as a crazy collector of all types of things.

Recent works in the studio.
(photo by Elliott Johnson)

S-F: Do you want your supports to reference the life they had before you found them? I think I’m trying to ask if you want the viewer to “read” your assemblages in any sort of narrative way, or are you more interested in creating a visual/non-verbal experience?

NW: Not really. I never set out to make something look like something else nor imply a narrative. If that is picked up by the viewer, that is all unintentional. I see the supports I'm using (primarily old wood and other construction materials) as pieces of abstract puzzles I have to figure out. The supports bump around the studio, get painted, drawn on and collaged together until one day I think they're done. So much of the way things land is also based on chance and me to try to find parts from around the studio that key into each other, or more specifically, when connected just sing in a sharper tune. It's a lot of pinning things together, living with them, pulling them apart, trying again - and when everything is right, the final construction happens.

In the studio:
"So much of the way things land is also based on chance and me to try to find parts from around the studio that key into each other, or more specifically, when connected just sing in a sharper tune." - Wilkinson

S-F: In your studio I remember thinking about how time is a really unconventional ingredient in your work. There’s the span of months, years, or decades that your supports had in the world before you ever came across them. And then there’s the studio time, where they seem to transform slowly, picking up new scratches and dings, getting disassembled and reassembled, layered or splotched with paint. Can you talk about time in relation to what you are trying to accomplish?

NW: Time, surface, and quite often the history that the objects carry were one of the first things that drew me to begin using them in the work. When I find pieces that I deem good candidates for the studio, I believe that it is my duty to be immediately suspicious of them and their worth. When you grab as many objects as I do you need to be sure things have a certain value/weight on their own and that they are compelling enough to be drug around the studio, sometimes for years, before they key into the right puzzle.

Above and below:
Untitled (Web IV)
2023, found trellis, found wood, flashe, colored pencil
28.25” x 28.25” x 4”
(photos by Elliott Johnson)

S-F: Can you talk about how structure, improvisation, rhythm, and space all play roles in your work?

NW: I have always felt very comfortable working improvisationally both professionally and in my art practice. As mentioned above, when I'm working in the studio I definitely feel like so much of the construction of these objects relies on moments of chance. Sitting down and plotting and planning is not what drives me .

Untitled
2024, found trellis, found wood, flashe, colored pencil, wire, plastic tape, hardware
96” x 67” x 3.5”

S-F: You are in a relatively small town that is far from traditional art hubs, and yet you’ve built a career and championed a community of artists. Can you talk about the pros and cons of living in Los Osos and doing what you’re doing without a lot of art world infrastructure?

NW: Living in Los Osos has provided a great life. It's a great community of people and my entire life, home, studio, gallery are all very close. I feel so lucky to be able to do what I'm doing here but it is far away from the larger art scenes and because of that studio visits are not as frequent as I'd like. When I first moved here (before smart phones and instagram) it was a pretty isolating moment for me, especially making the work I was making and finding myself in a community of artists and galleries that were rooted in a more traditional mode. When we started Left Field and began to bring shows to this community, the goal was to bring the art I wanted to see and bring other art communities HERE. After 10 years of that, I really think we have achieved that goal and continue to bring work to this area we wouldn't otherwise see here in San Luis Obispo county.

Above: the studio.

Below:
Untitled
2025, found wood, found hula hoop, found wire, flashe, colored pencil
52” x 39” x 3”
(photo by Elliott Johnson)

S-F: Who are you currently looking at (living or dead)?

NW: The beginning of an incomplete list of artists I admire includes some favorites like - Marlon Mullen, Lauren Satlowski, Ida Ekblad, David Hammons, Genvieve Figgis, Ryan Preciado, Sister Corita Kent, Marisol, Joe Bradley, Strauss Bourque-LaFrance, Robert Colescott, Matt Conors, Sean Sullivan, Daniel Giordano, Patricia Treib, Robert Gober, Martin Wong, Kristy Luck, Kawaii Kanjiro. AND with Left Field, the gallery I run, I am so lucky to have new artists entering my life and community every month as well as artists that come back to show multiple times. SO many, really too many to list, excite and inspire me so I'll save that list for another day.

S-F: What’s next for you?

NW: I'm currently in a big group show at Rockford University curated by Ari Norris and called Homage to the Square which runs through the end of February. I am also in a 4 person show that opens mid February at Santa Barbara City College Called Deep Color alongside the work of Jackie Rines, Vanessa Chow and Lauren Goldberg Longoria which I am also very excited for.

You can see more of Nick Wilkinson's work:
- on his website: www.nwilkinson.com/
- on his Instagram account: @_nickwilkinson_
- in maake magazine

Even more Wilkinson: