Nick Ferguson |

This website documents art research by Nick Ferguson. Presented here by project, the research combines art practice, social science, spatial theory, pedagogy and outreach events in order to examine the relationship between contemporary art, space and power. It informs understanding of the built environment – cities, suburbia and rural regions, contemporary art theory, and arts policy.

Recent and ongoing projects focus on London Heathrow, its neighbourhoods and airspace. Conducted in partnership with RESCALE (Research into Cities, Architecture, Landscape Environments), Kingston School of Art, they investigate opportunities and societal challenges mediated through the air. The expectation is an exhibition, publication and trans-disciplinary programme of events in 2019. Proposals for collaboration are welcome from across the disciplines.

Nick Ferguson is an early-career researcher based at Richmond, the American University in London. 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 philosophy, aesthetics and political geography, it traces a relationship between place-making art practices and classical liberalism’s conceptualisation of the way territory might function in a market society. Concurrently, and by way of methodological instrument with which to examine place making, the thesis develops a philosophy of indifference. Through case studies from art and literature, it contends that indifference, alongside disinterestedness and objectivity, should be understood as part of an historical attempt to develop a critical modern subject that might transcend the self and disrupt both public and private power. By extension, it is asked whether the cultivation of indifference to place might serve as an artistic tactic by which to negate the cultural forces that market place for the consolidation of private advantage.