About

Not decoration. Diagnosis.

Hersoid is the practice of painter Nick Hersey- work that spends a long time looking at the systems most of us have agreed not to look at too closely. Financial. Bureaucratic. Algorithmic. The kind of thing that runs your life quietly enough that you rarely stop to ask who built it, or why it looks the way it does.

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The work draws on Borges, Kafka, and Beckett- not as references to namedrop, but as the actual method. Borges for the way systems loop back on themselves until the map becomes the territory. Kafka for institutions that don't need to be cruel to be devastating; indifference does the job just as well. Beckett for what it looks like to keep going anyway.

Across the collections, the tone shifts depending on what the subject demands. Some works are sardonic- propaganda aesthetics turned against themselves, advertising language that admits what it's actually selling. Others are quieter: a figure alone on plain brown paper, no context given because none was needed. The throughline isn't a mood. It's a question, asked from different angles: what happens to meaning, agency, and feeling like a person, when the systems around you stop pretending to make sense.

The work was shown as a solo exhibition in New York in 2025. Individual prints have gone out to collectors across the UK, Europe, North America, and beyond — most of them people who found a piece, recognised something in it, and didn't need it explained to them.

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Every print is produced to archival standard- pigment inks, museum-grade cotton paper for limited editions, signed and numbered by hand where the edition calls for it. A print should last considerably longer than the news cycle it's commenting on. That's my marketing line. It's a production spec.

If a piece makes you laugh and then makes you slightly uncomfortable about what you were laughing at, it's probably working as I intended.