My grip
Jimmy Nuttall
02.05.2025 - 31.05.2025
Jimmy Nuttall
02.05.2025 - 31.05.2025
Haydens is
pleased to present My grip, a solo exhibition of new works by Jimmy
Nuttall.
My grip is a study of interiors: emotional, domestic, and psychological. Across painting, sculpture, and video, Nuttall transforms hoarded and discarded materials such as food cartons, pill boxes, and shopping bags into personal records of memory, consumption, and anxiety.
The world is collapsed into a series of repetitive, hand-painted bands of Vermilion and Oriental Red on Ivory White and Gesso primer in Rayures de ma grippe, evoking a sense of obsessive compulsion and tactile ritual. These stripes are applied to wallpaper, hidden sides of packaging, and canvas, referencing French aesthetic histories of Bonnard, Breton shirts, Buren, and Jean Paul Gaultier, while also mapping personal memory and queer experience. Not only do they engage the visual field but can be bodily, captivating our interoceptive senses. In their excess, they overwhelm and confuse, evoking a sense of disorientation and madness.
Rooms presents the shell of an apartment block or a stripped-back dollhouse, constructed from salvaged cardboard and painted with a carefully chosen palette. Drawing on personal memories of windows both real and imagined, from Paris to Darwin, Venice to the Côte d’Azur, it stands uninhabited and ambiguous: a site of absence, longing, and gay domesticity. Interiors are lined with striped fabric gifted and salvaged over time. The work blurs the line between model and memory, exploring themes of incompletion, and solitude.
Nuttall’s new video, In my rooms, weaves together spliced footage from 2000’s Melbourne and recent recordings from the artist’s time in Paris in 2024, ruminating on collections, interiors and exteriors, cats, and homosexuals. The early footage centres on the artist’s childhood pets and the imagined worlds he built for them: dollhouses, dioramas, and bedrooms. In the present day, cats are replaced by men, new subjects in the artist’s ongoing process of world-making. What was once innocent and imaginative is now refracted through a lens more longing and solitary. Influenced by the work of Guillaume Dustan, the video navigates intimacy and memory, forming a dialogue between childhood invention and adult reflection.
Through a combination of hoarding, painting, and recording, My grip explores intimacy, instability, and compulsion, tracing the relationship between desire, necessity, and the refusal to let go.
Jimmy Nuttall is a multi-disciplinary artist working across installation, painting, textile and filmmaking. His practice draws on personal histories and curiosities to explore favoured themes of desire, vulnerability versus control, nostalgia and memory. He enjoys working with hoarded and discarded materials and uses repetition and gesture in his ruminations.
For the last ten years Nuttall’s artistic practice has combined artist filmmaking to create narratives performed within and by his social and artistic milieu. His film works have been shown in solo exhibitions, screenings and film festivals, have been included in keynote exhibitions on queer artist filmmakers in the Asia Pacific.
Nuttall has worked for a number of artists within Australia and abroad, performing in works that have been presented in the Centre Pompidou. In 2024 he was a resident at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, and in 2020 he was tutored by Vaginal Davis at la haute école d’art et design (HEAD) in Geneva.
The word symptom originates from sympiptein, meaning “to befall, happen, coincide, fall together,”. Here in the gallery is a happening, a coinciding of objects of desire and domesticity, stitched lovingly together. Jim’s visual language is always coherent. His objects are blanketed in colour, pattern and playfully constructed, but the language of desire is not always conscious. Through covering, stitching and coincidence, these objects are in constant dialogue.
Stripes form a connective skin between all the works in this show. Flattened cardboard boxes, envelopes and hessian sacks covered in a red and white striped pattern, stripes on the inside of stacked boxes, stripes in the background of the video.
The stripes are set dressing, costume, cover, wallpaper, disguise and symptom. For Freud, the symptom is the return of the repressed where desire lies, under the covers. In the video on the opposing wall we see a naked man on top of the covers in bed, a naked body covering the striped objects, footage of cats nestling on bed covers, in loving dialogue with small childhood objects of memory and play.
The symptom is the formation of compromise, and compromise is everywhere in this exhibition. Objects in dis/agreement, settling in, negotiating space together, between objects that were once containers but are now objects of play and beauty, a compromise between Jim’s life in a Parisian studio, with replica windows found in miniature, and Jim’s life in suburban Melbourne.
The anxious, staccato editing of the video creates a conversation with itself, a self-consciousness, as your mind attempts to form a pattern and connection between images of animals being stroked, blackheads being expressed and sentences cut off. The camera lens becomes a window into memory, an opening onto desire and nostalgia.
Like symptoms these works loop and return, asking us not to interpret them, but to sit with their repetitions, their surfaces, their holes. In this exhibition, the symptom is not pathology but practice—a way of making, remembering, and desiring. It is through these layered compromises—between places, between objects, between skin and surface—that the work invites us to play.
- Sheena Colquhoun is a poet, economist and policy analyst based in Naarm/Melbourne. They also work in ceramics, painting and chairing the board of Flat Out Inc.
My grip is a study of interiors: emotional, domestic, and psychological. Across painting, sculpture, and video, Nuttall transforms hoarded and discarded materials such as food cartons, pill boxes, and shopping bags into personal records of memory, consumption, and anxiety.
The world is collapsed into a series of repetitive, hand-painted bands of Vermilion and Oriental Red on Ivory White and Gesso primer in Rayures de ma grippe, evoking a sense of obsessive compulsion and tactile ritual. These stripes are applied to wallpaper, hidden sides of packaging, and canvas, referencing French aesthetic histories of Bonnard, Breton shirts, Buren, and Jean Paul Gaultier, while also mapping personal memory and queer experience. Not only do they engage the visual field but can be bodily, captivating our interoceptive senses. In their excess, they overwhelm and confuse, evoking a sense of disorientation and madness.
Rooms presents the shell of an apartment block or a stripped-back dollhouse, constructed from salvaged cardboard and painted with a carefully chosen palette. Drawing on personal memories of windows both real and imagined, from Paris to Darwin, Venice to the Côte d’Azur, it stands uninhabited and ambiguous: a site of absence, longing, and gay domesticity. Interiors are lined with striped fabric gifted and salvaged over time. The work blurs the line between model and memory, exploring themes of incompletion, and solitude.
Nuttall’s new video, In my rooms, weaves together spliced footage from 2000’s Melbourne and recent recordings from the artist’s time in Paris in 2024, ruminating on collections, interiors and exteriors, cats, and homosexuals. The early footage centres on the artist’s childhood pets and the imagined worlds he built for them: dollhouses, dioramas, and bedrooms. In the present day, cats are replaced by men, new subjects in the artist’s ongoing process of world-making. What was once innocent and imaginative is now refracted through a lens more longing and solitary. Influenced by the work of Guillaume Dustan, the video navigates intimacy and memory, forming a dialogue between childhood invention and adult reflection.
Through a combination of hoarding, painting, and recording, My grip explores intimacy, instability, and compulsion, tracing the relationship between desire, necessity, and the refusal to let go.
Jimmy Nuttall is a multi-disciplinary artist working across installation, painting, textile and filmmaking. His practice draws on personal histories and curiosities to explore favoured themes of desire, vulnerability versus control, nostalgia and memory. He enjoys working with hoarded and discarded materials and uses repetition and gesture in his ruminations.
For the last ten years Nuttall’s artistic practice has combined artist filmmaking to create narratives performed within and by his social and artistic milieu. His film works have been shown in solo exhibitions, screenings and film festivals, have been included in keynote exhibitions on queer artist filmmakers in the Asia Pacific.
Nuttall has worked for a number of artists within Australia and abroad, performing in works that have been presented in the Centre Pompidou. In 2024 he was a resident at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, and in 2020 he was tutored by Vaginal Davis at la haute école d’art et design (HEAD) in Geneva.
The word symptom originates from sympiptein, meaning “to befall, happen, coincide, fall together,”. Here in the gallery is a happening, a coinciding of objects of desire and domesticity, stitched lovingly together. Jim’s visual language is always coherent. His objects are blanketed in colour, pattern and playfully constructed, but the language of desire is not always conscious. Through covering, stitching and coincidence, these objects are in constant dialogue.
Stripes form a connective skin between all the works in this show. Flattened cardboard boxes, envelopes and hessian sacks covered in a red and white striped pattern, stripes on the inside of stacked boxes, stripes in the background of the video.
The stripes are set dressing, costume, cover, wallpaper, disguise and symptom. For Freud, the symptom is the return of the repressed where desire lies, under the covers. In the video on the opposing wall we see a naked man on top of the covers in bed, a naked body covering the striped objects, footage of cats nestling on bed covers, in loving dialogue with small childhood objects of memory and play.
The symptom is the formation of compromise, and compromise is everywhere in this exhibition. Objects in dis/agreement, settling in, negotiating space together, between objects that were once containers but are now objects of play and beauty, a compromise between Jim’s life in a Parisian studio, with replica windows found in miniature, and Jim’s life in suburban Melbourne.
The anxious, staccato editing of the video creates a conversation with itself, a self-consciousness, as your mind attempts to form a pattern and connection between images of animals being stroked, blackheads being expressed and sentences cut off. The camera lens becomes a window into memory, an opening onto desire and nostalgia.
Like symptoms these works loop and return, asking us not to interpret them, but to sit with their repetitions, their surfaces, their holes. In this exhibition, the symptom is not pathology but practice—a way of making, remembering, and desiring. It is through these layered compromises—between places, between objects, between skin and surface—that the work invites us to play.
- Sheena Colquhoun is a poet, economist and policy analyst based in Naarm/Melbourne. They also work in ceramics, painting and chairing the board of Flat Out Inc.
