Residents of Barham Park and Brent had a hands-on chance to co-create and collaborate with two of Nick’s artworks: Cut & Stick Neighbourhoods, a city-building/place-making game and a cut-up poetry and collage workshop, and The Returning Tide, a collage series and poetry sequence that charts a constantly shifting city, just over the horizon.

Cut & Stick Neighbourhoods
Through a series of playful prompts, topography is laid out, infrastructure develops and histories are charted. Now a digital game, accessed here, everyone can join these neighbourhoods.

The Returning Tide
Made up of 110 framed playing card-sized collages, the series explores the implicitly divinatory nature of map-making and the gulf between the physical world and our desire to control and categorise it. Taking inspiration from cartomantic traditions such as Tarot, The Returning Tide seeks to look at the practice of symbology through a contemporary lens. Designed to be gently interactive, participants are invited to move the framed cards around within the exhibition, reworking the text and creating new connections within the narrative.

Nick Murray (they/them) will be artist-in-residence as part of our ACAVA Hosts: Barham Park Studios  Residency until spring 2025, a career development opportunity for a London-based artist from a Global Majority background who considers social engagement as integral to their studio practice.

Nick Murray joins a cohort of previous ACAVA Hosts alumni including Francesca Telling (2023-24) and Jack Rooney (2022-23).

The residency is generously supported by Arts Council England, through ACAVA’s National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) funding.