Volcanic Etchings and Reimagined Islands: Artist Nick Goss on Exploring the Warburg Photographic Collection

In this interview, artist Nick Goss shares insights into his artistic practice, recent exhibitions, and the creative role the Warburg Institute’s Photographic Collection has played in his work.

From reimagined islands to volcanic etchings, Goss explores themes of memory, history, and imagination, weaving personal and historical narratives into his evocative paintings.

Could you start by telling us a bit about yourself and your journey as an artist? 

I was born and raised in Bristol and moved to London when I was eighteen to study at the Slade and Royal Academy Schools. Since graduating, I have lived in London, working at my studio by the canal in Haggerston, East London.

What are the central themes or ideas you aim to explore in your paintings? 

A gallery I work with in Edinburgh described my work in a concise way that I found particularly fitting:

"Nick Goss is a painter whose (essentially figurative) paintings suggest apparently contradictory readings. On one hand there is the recognisable specificity of objects and environments rooted in factual, documentary reality: a photographic starting point perhaps, or an archival image offering an intensely palpable sense of place or experience. On the other there is always something more liminal at play - an uncertainty and otherness that never quite explains itself."

I aim to balance these two worlds—the tangible and the ambiguous—where stories, memories, and observations can collapse and unfold within a single scene.

At your recent show Isle of Thanet in Paris, you explored the history of the area once separated from mainland England. What intrigued you about this idea of an island, and how did you convey this sense of separation or isolation in your paintings? 

The genesis of the idea for this series of paintings began with a conversation with a curator who recently moved to Margate in Kent. She mentioned how that area of Kent including Margate, Broadstairs and Ramsgate used to be detached from the mainland, it was only in the 1600s that the river that separated The Isle of Thanet with the UK silted up and joined the two together. People who live in that part of the United Kingdom still refer to that area as ‘the Isle’.

This idea proved to be a starting point for a set of paintings that considers what it’s like living on an island, what that might mean in this point in time. Part fable, part based on observation there is a sense of time being compressed and collapsing in the paintings.

To convey this idea of separation I looked at one of my all-time favourite paintings by Arnold Bocklin called the Isle of the Dead. In that work, the viewer is placed on a small boat approaching an isle, possibly being escorted by Charon (from Greek mythology a ferryman who carries the souls of the dead across into the underworld) over the River Styx. I’ve always loved how the strange cold beauty of the rocks and trees of the island offsets the melancholic atmosphere of the scene.

In my work Walpole Bay I attempted to activate a similar feeling of unease. The viewer is heading towards an island marooned in the misty North Sea, using sketches of the cliffs surrounding Margate to construct an imaginary island emerging from the ocean. 

While researching for Isle of Thanet, you explored the Warburg Institute’s Photographic Collection. Can you describe how the images you found helped shape or inspire the final works? 

In Walpole Bay, I struggled to describe the high vertical cliffs running along the coast of Thanet. Rather than illustrate the cliffs directly in the painting, I wanted to instead evoke the atmosphere you feel when you are walking along the coastal path

I realised one of the images I had photographed and turned into a silk screen from the Warburg Photographic collection, an illustration of an Orlando Furioso poem, might have an interesting texture that could be intertwined into the painting. The image depicts people attempting to cross turbulent waters towards a marooned piece of land. It wasn’t my intention to use this silk-screened historical fragment in that painting, but as soon as I started printing into the wet paint it became exactly what the painting needed. The watery flow of the paint sits in direct counterpoint to the mechanical language of the historical etching, but somehow, they work together. Sometimes when you mix these languages a type of alchemy is stumbled upon that can be fleeting but very exciting.

Your 2023 exhibition, The Smickel Inn, at Ingleby Gallery featured works that blended personal memories with historical imagery. Could you tell us more about the concept behind this series and how it took shape? 

I’m half Dutch, and the Smickel Inn is a real place at the edge of Rotterdam Harbour. I went to the harbour with my aunty and brother and stumbled on this fast food building right under the wind turbines almost in the North Sea.

It’s an in-between space, and in the show it is a real place but also a psychological idea – a place of arrival and departure with a somewhat other worldly atmosphere. By combining observed photos of the Smickle Inn spliced with found fragments of etchings and imagery from the Warburg Photographic Collection I wanted to build on this other worldliness. The result is a series of works where time seems to behave non-linearly and explores the colonial history of the harbour and its connected structures. 

In your work Frikandel, you depicted a view from a Dutch snack bar and incorporated an etching of Mount Etna from the Warburg’s Photographic Collection. What was it about this volcanic image that resonated with you, and how did it shift the meaning or context of the painting? 

I located the Italian Etching, dated 1669, in the magic and science folders in the Photographic Collection. I remember flicking through many incredible images in that folder, but being stopped in my tracks by this scene of the smoke billowing over the bay of Syracuse. I look for shocks in the studio, moments where what you originally thought the painting is achieving is undermined or changed in someway. The thought process went along the lines of: ‘what is the most unlikely thing you would see gazing through the window of a North Sea facing Dutch snack bar’? I experimented with various images and scenes I had uncovered in the Warburg Archive, but after much trial and error, the section of the smoke billowing across the sea from Mount Etna supplied that jolt in the studio. When I removed the screen and the sheets of paper, it felt strange to see these two disparate elements conjoined, but somehow completely believable.

I only use fragments of these images when I’m screen printing onto the canvasses. I deploy them like broken shards—similar to how Hannah Höch or Kurt Schwitters used pages torn from textbooks or newspapers. This slows the reading of the painting right down for the viewer, supplying a more lengthy reveal that changes depending on what memories or imaginative reading each individual is bringing to the painting. I’m more interested in how a viewer might decipher the relationship between the volcano and the objects painted in the painting rather than supplying any clear or singular reading of the work. 

How did you first come across the Warburg Institute’s Photographic Collection, and what drew you to use it as a source of inspiration in your artwork? 

Initially, my brother, Phil Goss, recommended visiting the collection, we were working on a collaborative project with a clothing brand based on Orpheus and Eurydice mythology. A while later my good friend Tom Marks recommended meeting up at the Warburg Institute, he was completing a fellowship there and introduced me to Paul Taylor at the Photographic collection.

I vividly remember looking up imagery connected to a deluge or floods, Paul pulled out a folder from a filing cabinet filled with the most eclectic and strange imagery and from then on I’ve been visiting whenever I can. 

When you visit the Warburg Institute, do you start with a specific idea in mind, or do you explore the Collection freely to discover unexpected connections?  

Very much the latter, over time I have realised it’s best not to have preconceived ideas of what you are looking for, the collection very much leads the enquiry. I might arrive with a few key themes, but I like the idea that the images you uncover are going to take you on a journey. The subjective, nonlinear way the collection is set up always reminds me of how an artist’s thinking evolves when they draw in the studio, time slows a little and one lateral thought will lead to a new idea. You will go in looking for imagery to do with weather patterns for example, but a folder in the same draw labelled Magic, Divination, Prophecy Playing Cards will prove so enticing that you forget your initial ideas and begin a new investigation. 

Time seems to slip, one rabbit hole leads to another, before long I’m carrying a fifteenth-century astrological zodiac by Baldini to the scanner and all the ideas I had for the new paintings have shifted. I have found working with the Collection has dramatically expanded the parameters of what I thought my paintings could depict, there is a lifetime’s worth of research and investigation in those folders.

Now that you’ve spent time engaging with the Warburg’s Photographic Collection, are there other specific themes or images within the collection that you’re planning to delve into for future projects?

When I was at the newly revamped Warburg I started to look through the collection of glass slides the Collection have. In a draw marked Astrology and Comets I found some slides showing odd circular amoeba like structures floating in space. They turned out to be Annie Besant and S.W. Leadbeater’s Thought Forms, an attempt to illustrate what thoughts might look like. They are unbelievably beautiful illustrations that made me think of comets and seem to depict an invisible realm, I’d like to explore these further the next time I am there. 

Are there any exhibitions or projects on the horizon that you’re particularly looking forward to?

My first solo show in over ten years in New York will take place early May 2025 at the Mathew Brown Gallery in Tribeca. The paintings I have been researching at the Warburg will be heading over that way. I’m very much looking forward to it as New York still has a particular pull for artists and it’s a great space in the heart of the new gallery district.

Nick Goss (b. 1981, Bristol) is a London-based painter who studied Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art (2002–2006) and completed an MA in Fine Art at the Royal Academy Schools (2006–2009). Known for his atmospheric and layered approach to painting, his solo exhibitions include Isle of Thanet (2024, Perrotin, Paris), Smickel Inn, Balcony of Europe (2023, Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh), The Undercurrents (2022, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles) and Nine Mile Burn (2020, Josh Lilley, London). His work has been shown internationally, including in London, New York, Berlin, and Los Angeles.