Holotype – Aaron King-Cole

Aaron King-Cole (b. 1984, Auckland) lives in Devonport with his partner and two daughters. A self- described Drawer, but whose practice has included printmaking, painting and felting over the years.

The first word within reach to describe King-Cole’s work could be Pattern, but as time is spent with it, pattern might also describe habit, behaviour, and system.

“I’m designing ways to lose control” King-Cole says of his current practice, the production of works on paper using dip-pen and watercolours to repeat an idea or motif until the surface is covered by a creeping lattice.

During the development of these patterns he is not just redrawing the same thing, opportunities are taken, experiments are made, there are mistakes, some ideas are abandoned and others preserved in a cyclical feedback that reads and writes its own progress.

There are compositional objectives too, but ultimately King-Cole does not know what a work will look like, he draws it to find out, and each deliberate stroke is a step toward completing something only to be known later.

“I’m interested in emergent properties found with the repetition of information or accumulation of matter, how this produces a novel artefact or experience, how order arises in chaos, or wonder in banality.

My thinking returns often to the way we find or create all sorts of meaning in things, how we gather information, and how we recognise something is to be read in the first place.

…what is the shape of communication? – what is that experience?”

A line of interest that could spark conversation speaking biologically, psychologically, physically, or socially; one thing King-Cole’s work attempts is to record visually, a response to this enquiry.

The resulting works are a unifying balance of mechanical mark making and organic development, that might invite the viewer to be aware of their own critical examination and search for meaning – to find organisational participation, in what could have been passive observation.

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Aaron King-Cole studied at Elam School of Fine Arts, graduating with a Bachelors Degree in 2008. He has work in the Wallace Arts Trust Collection, and is a past Finalist for the Parkin Drawing Prize.

Previous solo and group exhibitions include: On Line, Sanderson Contemporary, Auckland (2015); Metrick, Northart, Auckland (2014); Nature Notes, Northart, Auckland (2014); Pocket Edition, Northart, Auckland (2013); Gang Bang, Method and Manners, Auckland (2012); Into the Wild, Long White Cloud, London (2011); Do You Mind? – in collaboration with the Centre for Brain Research, Ironbank, Auckland (2010); Glam Rot Glow, The High Seas, Auckland (2010)