"Nick Goss paints places that he knows, that he has inhabited, however briefly. His most recent body of work, compiled in the Tin Drum publication, depicts a series of largely interior spaces associated with his everyday activity the studio, a band rehearsal room, a museum or a library – where thoughts and ideas attempt to gain traction.

He is a deliberate painter. Working from drawings, photographs and rudimentary balsa wood and paper models, he employs an unspectacular vocabulary of forms to re-imagine a place, and his memory and experience of it. Tables, chairs, doors, pot plants, lamps and musical instruments emerge, sometimes only marginally, before receding again in time to reappear elsewhere. Figures appear beside them in several of the scenes, rehearsing or performing in a strange, carnival-like procession.

Looking at these new works, and at some of the earlier paintings that have preceded them, one senses an almost constant absence of resolution. They can at times feel wilfully incomplete. Some, such as Deluge or Timpani Hill seem to imply that they might once have contained a considerably greater level of visual information, which was subsequently removed, washed or scraped away."

— from the text by Jasper Sharp

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Tin Drum at Josh Lilley in 2012.