Nick Ferguson | Art, Architecture and Landscape

Nick Ferguson is an artist and academic based in London. His research examines the relationship between art, space and power, with recent and ongoing projects focusing on London Heathrow, its neighbourhoods and airspace. In 2019 he was awarded an Arts Council Project Grant to curate the exhibition and public programme, Air Matters. Learning from Heathrow, Watermans Arts. He holds a BA from Oxford University, an MA from the University of the Arts and a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London. He is Associate Dean for Research at Richmond University and Senior Lecturer in Critical and Historical Studies at Kingston School of Art.

His doctoral thesis, Indifference. Art, Liberalism and the Politics of Place, (2015) examines the legacy of classical liberal thought in contemporary art commissioning in Britain. Through a series of cross readings between aesthetic theory, political philosophy, political geography and arts policy documents, it traces a relationship between location driven art commissioning and liberalism’s conceptualization of the way territory might function in a market society. These elaborations open onto a structural critique of the relationship between neoliberalism and location-driven art commissioning.

Central to the discussion are various and often incompatible conceptualizations of indifference, as mobilized across liberal political thought, economics and art. It is argued that in the context of location-driven art commissioning since the 1990s, two antithetical versions of indifference have been uniquely conjoined. These are a once-critical indifference that sought to disrupt hegemonic power, and the indifference that underpins laissez-faire economics. For this reason, arts commissioning that promises social amelioration is fraught with radical contingencies and contradictions. Read PhD abstract

Subject interests

Art and spatial politics

Art in relation to activism, the commons and the public sphere

Art and cultural policy, including the role of art and art institutions in regional, national and international relations

Art in relation to environment and political ecology

Art in relation to air, airspace and atmospheres

Cities, especially London and its peripheries

Art as research method; decolonising research methodologies.

Political theology

Digital humanities