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With her solo exhibition, Membranes, artist Nicole Coson lends tactility to hollowed objects. By fleshing out the contours of empty spaces, she captures the essence of things. The aftermath lingers like sillage or a phantom limb. It rouses the yearning to touch, taste, smell, and feel, if <span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-weight: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">only to emphasize the cold, hard truths distilled within.
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Spartan yet spectral sums up Membranes, Nicole Coson&rsquo;s latest solo exhibition with Silverlens. Spartan in structure, it offers skeletal facsimiles of objects. Spectral in nature, it investigates the unseen and invites the viewer into a vantage point where one can chase or confront ghosts. Being in Coson&rsquo;s world is like experiencing a limbo where ghosts occupy familiar objects like window blinds, oyster shells, or fruit crates. These ghosts can also be stories, secrets, or residual identities gnawing at the audience&rsquo;s psyche with their distance or emptiness.
 Coson says, &ldquo;I like to use printmaking as a way of looking at something almost forensically. I started looking into the oldest examples of print. Among them was the Shroud of Turin. I&rsquo;m not a religious person, but I love that this was used as proof that something had existed.&rdquo;&nbsp;
 Also known as the Holy Shroud, it&rsquo;s a linen cloth bearing the faint image of a man consistent with the depiction of Jesus of Nazareth after the crucifixion. The incidental imprinting resembles the process that went into creating Circuits, the first series from Membranes. Coson reused plastic fruit crates from eBay and East London streets, dipped them in black ink, and pressed them onto linen.
 The artist&rsquo;s enduring love for the natural fabric was ignited when her friend, designer Carl Jan Cruz, gifted her a black linen top. While it humors her that she has worn it at least weekly since receiving it, the turn of events attests to linen&rsquo;s ability to weather changing times and conditions. It has become the ideal vessel for the artist&rsquo;s signature visual provocations that combine her experiments in printmaking and painting. From above, the patterned crates look like a city or a circuit board. On eye level, the viscous brushstrokes serve as a close approximation of the containers&rsquo; subsistence inside a cargo ship.

Circuits

Continuing her inquiry from last year&rsquo;s exhibition, In Passing, Coson pays attention to how mundane objects such as containers can become the very threads that carry, sustain, and weave identities and nations together. Their manufactured ubiquity is easy to ignore but impossible to live without. Similarly, her technique traces a sense of lack to highlight what was once fully formed. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll never see the set of lines that I actually use. It&rsquo;s about deleting things, the presence of something through its absence,&rdquo; she says.
 Vanitas, the second series in Membranes, sets this statement in motion. Dozens of mesh casing sculptures scatter like food across a table, reminiscent of vanitas still life paintings, a representation of memento mori (&ldquo;remember you must die&rdquo;), which explores ideas of transience and the futility of earthly pleasures. It recalls the mercantile history of the Philippines and unmasks the skeletons of its ostentation. What remains is a hollowed cornucopia precipitating intimate encounters with ghosts inside the shell.
 Recognizing the void and interstices seems to be a recurring motif in Coson&rsquo;s practice. However, it wasn&rsquo;t always a conscious decision. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m only beginning to really see it because normally, I just respond to these urges or these intense obsessions,&rdquo; she notes. Instead of denying their presence, Coson exhumes newfound realities from space and stillness by allowing buried narratives to rise out of the ether.

Vanitas

You once described your work as functioning from in-betweens &mdash; between organic and mechanical, printmaking and painting, anonymous and personal. Does this still hold or do you feel like you&rsquo;ve arrived at some sort of destination? I believe that it is in the interstices where something interesting seems to happen, in the trajectories of things and people, within the states of the neither here nor there, where things cannot be so easily pinned down, located, or categorized for there is freedom within an undefinable form.
 Where do you work and live in London? How would you compare your practice in Manila to your practice in other cities? I rent a studio in a building in East London where many other creative friends who are artists, writers, fashion, graphic, and furniture designers have studios. It&rsquo;s an inspiring community which I am grateful to be a part of, a site of creative exchange where we share ideas and give each other feedback, which is important in an otherwise quite isolating vocation. I don&rsquo;t have a studio in the Philippines so it&rsquo;s more of a place I return to and be with my friends and family as well as relish in familiar surroundings, sights, tastes, and smells. The Philippines is where I can truly feel myself so it&rsquo;s been important to stay physically connected to it as much as I can.
 How did you get into printmaking? What were your chosen modes of creating or visualizing when you were younger? I spent a lot of time drawing things around me as well as taking pictures as a child. I think I had, and still have, an obsessive desire to document the things, places, and people around me as a way of processing and understanding the world more deeply. I would try and draw objects which I held in one hand behind my back through touching and feeling their grooves, corners, and curves in hopes to capture something that my eyes couldn&rsquo;t see onto the paper. Printmaking, I feel, does something similar in the sense that imprints capture the tangibleness of things, specifically the presence as well as the absence of the subject I&rsquo;m interested in.

How did you gravitate toward abstraction?&nbsp; What made it attractive to you as opposed to more direct forms of artmaking? My paintings may appear as abstractions from afar but they are imprints, casts, or facsimiles of real objects that I wish to invite the viewer to examine more closely. Each slat of blinds, crate, or oyster shell has made some type of contact with my work whether directly or indirectly. I think this grounds my work in our visual reality, therefore I don&rsquo;t consider it abstraction, rather they are residues of a moment of close contact.
 Your work has a cerebral and contemplative approach. The way I see them, like in Exoskeleton and Exeunt, your prints seem so orderly at first glance yet they carry so much tension, as if one push or pull can disintegrate the elements. Is tension something you look for in art? I think the tension naturally comes into my work because there are often two or more opposing forces at play. In Exeunt, I &lsquo;paint&rsquo; a portrait of me and my late father by dissecting and reassembling a site that is charged with memory yet with neither of us within the frame. Exoskeleton, both claustrophobic and meditative, aims to reveal and withhold the inside and outside worlds we occupy. I try and capture the kind of stillness that begins to oscillate as you look closer.
 Meanwhile, your playfulness seems to come out with your food projects. What&rsquo;s your current food obsession or venture? In my last series of dinners, I examined how cultural exchange attributed to trade and migration can be observed through familiar recipes by simply tracing back the origins of the individual ingredients on our plate. Food is a means by which we can better understand the invisible lattices of movement that drape across the borders of the world we know. I think of my cooking as just another approach to artmaking, another way of taking a closer look at who we were, who we are, and who we are destined to become. Food can act as a portal through time connecting us to our past and future.
 In Passing and Membranes deal with diaspora, nostalgia, and globalization. What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of belonging to a widely diasporic community?&nbsp; I&rsquo;m interested in the way people and things move throughout the world. I think it is through the analysis of these trajectories and the historical circulation of things that we can truly understand ourselves. Within a diasporic community, I believe movement becomes the medium from which we experience the world. I believe movement, whether it&rsquo;s time, space, or both, helps us see and even love things more clearly.

I try and capture the kind of stillness that begins to oscillate as you look closer.

Nicole Coson's Solo Exhibition, Membranes, Shows Us the Presence of Absence

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