NICOLAS OSBORN

Born in London, 1979, to an English father and French mother.

First time I was taken to a restaurant I started to cover the window with spaghetti. 

Went to a bilingual school from the age of five. On the weekends I would always go to the countryside. 

One time I was climbing a tree, which was not unusual. I was almost at the top – I remember this tree being very high up – and as I reached for the next branch my foot slipped and I fell. As I fell backwards out of this tree my speed was slowed and my fall cushioned every half a metre by a branch, continuously until I reached the ground, softly. Although I fell about five or six metres onto my back it felt like just one, and the ground was soft. It was as if the tree had guided me down with its many hands and I almost wanted to do it again. 

When I was 11 or 12, I was reading Terry Pratchett and burst into uncontrollable laughter on my bed. 

When I was 14 I went to live in the country in France with my family. A year later we moved again. One night, I sat in my new empty room of white walls and I cried. 

Once I got stuck in the dark with two friends. We thought we saw a boar’s eyes so we all ran up a tree. The tree started to sway more and more, it was going to break so we legged in the darkness towards the light. Halfway I fell into a metre-deep puddle. 

At school I studied Fine Art and French literature. 

When I was 19 I came back to do a foundation course at Chelsea. 

Years later I was skint and waiting at a bus stop about 12 at night. The red ticket machine swallowed my pound but didn’t give me a ticket. I started kicking the shit out of the machine with excessive clumsy Karate Kid-esque movements swearing out loud. Wether or not this provided entertainment to the 25 or so people also waiting I don’t know. I thought after, that in that instant I had become the ‘type’ of person I had been warned about as a child.

I make audio-visual performance pieces. Some of the concerns behind my work are the repression and expression of emotion within our social masquerade and the possibilities of movement between fixed generic codification.

2009.