All We Are
JAMES MAKIN GALLERY
Collingwood, Melbourne
2 - 26 July 2025
Essay by Brigid Cara Reid - Curator
All We Are presents a continuation of Nic Plowman’s exploration of both traditional and experimental drawing techniques. His practice is grounded in a longstanding commitment to figuration and portraiture, shaped by an intimate engagement with mortality. Through a series of botanicals and life drawings, demonstrating his breadth of skill and fluency across drawing mediums—Plowman reveals the fragility and determination of the human spirit.
Plowman’s work is informed by personal encounters with the brevity of life. These experiences deepen his interrogation of the human form and its capacity to express both vulnerability and resilience. Engaging with the tension between human fragility and endurance, he positions the body as both subject and site of emotional truth. His practice becomes a visual articulation of survival, pain, and the poetics of existence.
Scale plays a significant role throughout the exhibition. At times, the figure looms with monumental force, fully realised and commanding in its presence. In other moments, the figure is soft and shadowy, loosely rendered on the page, evoking the vulnerability and transience of the body. In Baby (No. 3) (2024), the figure is newly born, barely out of the womb and thrust into the world. The magnitude of this moment is reflected in the scale of the image. She hovers before the viewer, fists clenched, experiencing breath for the first time. This suspended animation resonates with Jamieson Webster’s On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe (Webster, 2024), which explores the profound and often overlooked act of breathing, particularly in the context of trauma, anxiety and crisis. Drawing on her work as a psychoanalyst, Webster reveals how breath intersects deeply with our emotional and psychological lives.
Webster considers breath as a site where the psychological, emotional and existential converge, in-line with this, Plowman’s figures seem to physically embody that precarious threshold. Plowman’s work remains both symptomatic and restorative, becoming a means of processing pain, bearing witness and acknowledging the resilience embedded in the human condition. For Plowman the body is not only observed, it is inhabited, remembered and experienced.
Working between realism and gestural mark-making, Plowman inhabits a space where representation meets intuition. His lines are both precise and fractured, expressive and restrained, allowing technique to echo the instability and shifting nature of identity itself. In Untitled Figurative Drawing No. 1 (2025), this figure is poised between stability and motion. She is caught in a quiet moment of contemplation, as subtle, swirling lines encircle her— evoking the constant flux of the present moment.
Plowman has been a finalist in the Doug Moran Portrait Prize and the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship. Most recently he was awarded Highly Commended in the 24th Dobell Drawing Prize, recognising the emotional sensitivity and formal refinement of his practice.
All We Are extends an invitation to encounter the shared weight of human experience. These works do not turn away from the difficult truths of embodiment; instead, they hold them with care. At once tender and unflinching, they speak to resilience, the persistence of life and the bittersweet reality of what it means to be human.