Nick Herman

In the spirit of channeling the anima personified by the watershed in the collective body of el valle de Atemajac @estudioisacarrillo and I have drawn some cards... as part of our collaboration with @artlab_gdl y @observaciudades.tec

Seguimos en la increíble residencia de @estudioisacarrillo y @sincerelyhide explorando fuentes y manantiales de la ciudad de Guadalajara en colaboración con el @observaciudades.tec . ¡Sigan viendo!

past as prologue as prolapse

Very happy to be back in GDL this week beginning a new project related to fountains. In this next iteration I will continue to explore the function of fountains in our cities… where they “remain explicitly corporeal, a wild, vestigial assembly whose hybridity links medicine and ritual, architecture, ecology and art right out in the open, framing questions of progress and the future to all who encounter them in the public.” This thesis is the framing for a new residency in collaboration with my dear friend Isa Carrillo @estudioisacarrillo and sponsored by Art.Lab at Tec de Monterrey @artlab_gdl under the vision of artist Florencia Guillen @florenciaguillenbel along with new colleagues @observaciudades.tec for whom water and the city are a central rubric for mapping social ecologies. In residency over the next five months Isa and I will compile an atlas subterráneo to be published by Tec that documents the many occult iterations of the fountains within this unique city and around the world.

this guy making debut at @erathbones new cool project @claysita.studio

SUBASTA 2026 Nick Herman / @sincerelyhide Untitled (natur morte), 2025 Impresión digital y stencil 17 × 13 in Pieza donada por el artista Catálogo DM o [email protected]

Loved the recent think piece in the @theatlantic exploring the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and its deployment in Trump’s authoritarian admin. Most simplistically understood as a “real world” view based on man’s inherently brutish nature, Hobbes' and by extension Trump’s dipshit Rasputin Stephen Miller, argues for absolute authority and power as the only way to govern. The essay, written by @galbeckerman makes a profoundly important and nuanced rebuttal not only to the administration’s logic but the overly reductive interpretation of "Leviathan" Hobbes most famous book, where he argues that in order to prevent total war humans need an absolute ruler (or monarch). No mention of Mencius Moldbug in the essay but easy to trace those coordinates ... I have recently been writing around the "Leviathan "from a radically different angle as I explore the function of the fountain as a central axis of the commons. In my own upcoming essay and continuing research in Guadalajara (announcement soon about exciting new project) I liken the fountain to a kind of proto-leviathan (from the Hebrew words lavah, meaning "to couple, connect or join" and thannin "a serpent or dragon") that by projecting a common liquid body and sculptural vernacular could help reorient and reanimate cities in ways desperately needed. As illustrated in the famous frontispiece of Hobbes' book, the composite body / pneumatic matrix is the actual vision of his philosophy inspiring, according to Beckerman both the Enlightenment and our erstwhile Democracy. In my view, these ideas and material artifacts can be traced back much further to hermetic and Taoist themes of inner alchemy wherein the body's health is also projected outward to frame a cosmological good. .... continuará

Here’s something like a bench test for some of the newer works that were fired but not completed in Guadalajara. My idea(s) for the residency @ceramicasuro was to continue to explore my interest in sound making sculptures… ceramics being so intrinsically connected to the belly and mouth. Some of these ideas date 15 years or more to my show Fatland @thebrick_la (formerly LAXART) where I used hunting calls and more recently the work I did in Oaxaca @casawabi in the manglar. Many comment they look like organs… which sounds about right… Originally I titled my proposal Sinfonia Ceramica but of course wetlands and forests are hardly symphonies… there is no order but the call and response of territory, desire, fear, chaos. So I fell back on the working title “pan”.. both because the word for swamp in Spanish is pantano and because a fundamental principle of editing sound and making dimensional space is of course the pan pot.   Elements are coming into focus…I love using the coneless speakers sometimes known as a sound exciters. In part because they literally animate the vessels. That objects might have agency.. that there are invisible registers that link animals, things, systems together.. this is for me the subject of the work…. Sculpture as antenna as amplifier as signal as body.   Using plastic tubes to connect various autonomous objects allows for this vision of aural entanglement as well as for the movement of water since some are also fountains. Also, the tubes become another conduit for mechanical vibrations thereby allowing one object’s calls to travel to another… a rudimentary telephone. While simple, my dream of a sculptures playing themselves is beginning to take shape.   Finally as I have noted in past posts the use of photography as source material for the surfaces… while not new in ceramics this for me is an exciting intersection for a larger theory of teleplasty as framed by Caillois and others. Mimesis clearly is a catalyst in soundscapes and I look forward to further blurring the registers of speciation and ontological agency using this somewhat uncontrollable process of decals to create skins for the objects. A swamp en flux. Stay tuned.

Before too much time elapses, I wanted to acknowledge that my residency @ceramicasuro like so many creative opportunities in life was in part due to a friendship and a long-ago collaborative project. In 2009 when I moved to Los Angeles from New York two Brooklyn friends @sarahcrowner and @nickolney pitched the idea of publishing an artist book exploring Sarah’s work in the context of her influences. A huge fan then as now of her hybrid practice it was a great opportunity to help frame Sarah’s ideas as well as contribute an essay that, along with a second contribution by the incomparable Todd Alden @aldenprojects would explore in elliptical ways what became “Selective Geometries.” As everyone familiar with Crowner’s work and career is well aware, ceramics have played an important part in her practice amplifying I think many of the themes presented in that very special publication—most notably the way pieces can come together to form a whole (to misquote Lawrence Weiner) and produce a performative ground. Sarah’s ceramic work has often been accomplished with the help of Ceramica Suro and so, 15 or more years after our first creative intersection it was my good fortune to be introduced by Crowner to Jose Noe and have the opportunity to take up residency in their factory in Guadalajara. Nothing is more important than the network you build and the collaborations you invest in. That’s the radical of art and the power, still, of printed matter. Thank you Sarah and Nick for that invitation so long ago. Still proud of the book and thrilled to be again working with barro. last pic shows Crowner’s tiles permanently installed inside the factory as well as the blurry work of three new friends from left to right @alejandrogarciacontreras @nilserichsenmartin @irvynroho

"INUNDATED LANDS SWELL AND BURST" One of 5 "basin" fountains I made @ceramicasuro I made a series of these more traditional fuentes along with the sound organs that are still being finished. Each basin has a found text taken from science textbooks. Many thanks @hiconstantino for teaching me how to write in clay and @twilightzone.isa for the patio. «TIERRAS INUNDADAS SE HINCHAN Y ESTALLAN» Una de las 5 fuentes con forma de cuenco que hice en @ceramicasuro . Creé una serie de estas fuentes más tradicionales, junto con los órganos sonoros que aún se están terminando. Cada cuenco tiene un texto encontrado, extraído de libros de texto de ciencias. Muchas gracias a @hiconstantino por enseñarme a escribir en arcilla y @twilightzone.isa para el patio.

whistleintowater