The Mobile Landscape is a slideshow with a documentary-style narrative that describes Ferguson’s journeys around the highways of England. In search of a site for a public art project, the artist takes the viewer along rural stretches of the motorway to inspect a series of roadside advertising hoardings in South East England. They are the type mounted on obsolete transport infrastructure and which are strategically positioned on agricultural land. As the hoardings are surveyed for their potential, there emerges a political history of the view from the road: of a countryside sculpted by the comings and goings of capital; of rural aspirations and anxieties; of clandestine livelihoods sustained by proximity to the road.
Nick Ferguson is a London-based artist and writer, whose research and practice span art, urbanism and political philosophy. His practice examines the political histories of built environments – rural, urban and maritime. Through fieldwork, modelling, building, talking and writing, it engages with the way that territory is acquired, organised and used. There is a concern with landscape, the picturesque (especially as played out in suburbia), and the relationship between vision and possession.
Ferguson’s writing focuses on the role that contemporary art has played in the construction of the built environment more generally: in the aspiration for a more democratic distribution of places through aesthetic forms and social events; in the expectation from art’s state, private and corporate investors of return; in art’s presentation of local histories for scrutiny and interpretation in the public domain. He has recently completed a practice based PhD in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London.