My name is Graeme Nash, I'm English and I've lived here in St Kogat for over 30 years
and I'm an artist.
I work here in La Floresta, I'm trying to get exhibitions for my work, but more than
that it's given me a freedom of expression that I've never really enjoyed in any other
phase of my life and so I just consider myself to be a very lucky person.
We came to Barcelona by pure chance, I think a lot of my life has been driven by chance
and it just so happened that my wife was actually working in London and she was running the
Spanish market from a company in London and they asked her whether she would like to come
and live in Barcelona for three years to run the business from here and I was in a
transitionary period between jobs and she came home one day and said, my boss has said
would you like to go and live in Barcelona and I said oh that's where the Sagrada Família
is isn't it, the Gaudi Church and she said yes and I said yeah that sounds like a good
idea and it was like that, that's the truth.
We came here and fell in love with Catalunya and we've done basically since then we've
done everything we possibly could to stay here and we've succeeded in being here for
34 years so yeah great, very lucky.
And I think that I was born an artist, I was always drawing as a child, I was always creating
things as a child, my first job was as a graphic artist and an illustrator in an advertising
agency, I went to art college but due to family pressures I was motivated to find a real job
which was either accountancy or the law or one of those professions and I tried to do
all of those things and eventually wound up back in creative work but marketing so the
closest thing I could get to an expression of my artistic desires and motivations was
to work in marketing and I've always worked in creative marketing in one form or another.
It was just by pure chance, I bought some wire and I thought I'll just make a wire design
in wire and I made a design in wire and I thought that's interesting, maybe I should
paint it so I painted it and it looked quite good actually, one of the first things I did
and then I thought hmm it would be interesting if it had some sort of form and you know this
is only two years ago.
So from nothing to where I am today it's just been just like a progression and I feel that
I'm where I should be so I started doing work like the more abstract work and then I decided
that what I should really do is to go back and start from the beginning again and study
anatomy, study the tools I needed.
There's a line between chaos and order and this line is chance, this planet exists because
it was created over billions of years and it happens to be a certain distance from
a star which provides heat and provides certain elements which allows life to exist here.
This whole thing of chance I wanted to try and embody that in my sculptures in other
ways but I wanted to try and do was choose a material, provide a frame, a three-dimensional
frame and then allow the material through natural laws, gravity, the ambient temperature,
the viscosity of the material, the chemical makeup of the material that I'm using to speak,
to allow it to take its own form, thus making the pieces that I created closer to the essence
of everything.
