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 Centre. 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. Through a series of cross readings between political philosophy, aesthetic theory and political geography, it traces a relationship between location-driven art and liberalism’s conceptualisation of the way territory might function in a market society. Concurrently, the thesis maps a counter aesthetics of indifference, at large in art and literature since the mid nineteenth century, whereby indifference is mobilised by the critical modern subject in the attempt to disrupt both public and private power.

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 air, airspace and atmospheres

Cities, especially London and its peripheries

Political theology

Digital humanities