When artist Nick McMillen is drawing, very little can distract him. “I’m oblivious to everything around me,” he says. “It’s as if I lose consciousness and then three or four hours later, I come to and realise I’ve completed another section.”
Looking at his finished works – intricate studies of sycamore keys, lichens or of the winter skeletons of trees – it’s easy to see how he could become so absorbed: the detail is extraordinary. “I try to draw them as I would a portrait of a person,” he says, “to elevate them on some level. I think they’re amazing things that deserve to be noticed and I want to highlight their significance in our lives and in the planet’s ecosystem.”
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This same desire inspires his other work too: beautiful bi-coloured panels and baskets made of woven tree bark. Based on techniques used by First Nation weavers from the Pacific Northwest, Nick painstakingly forms strips of bark into patterns reminiscent of sine waves or distant planets. “By using ancient, indigenous skills and natural materials to represent cutting-edge scientific ideas, I want to
raise awareness of what we’re doing to our environment and to open up a discussion about our thirst for knowledge and where it leads,” he says.
If I can get people to look more closely at nature and their environment, then my hope is that they might start to take more care of it
“It fascinates me that the only thing that separates those people sitting around a campfire making baskets 10,000 years ago and those minds making telescopes that can look into the deepest parts of the universe now, is accumulated knowledge. Essentially, we still have the same brains and the same hands.”
Although Nick has always drawn and made things, his focus on nature and trees came after the survival programmes of Ray Mears inspired him to enrol on a year-long bushcraft instructor course. “It combined so many things that I liked: the outdoors, the countryside, making things,” he says.
By using ancient, indigenous skills and natural materials to represent cutting-edge scientific ideas, I want to raise awareness of what we’re doing to our environment
The curriculum covered everything from tree and plant identification to making longbows and cooking techniques, but it was the bark work and basket making that really struck a chord. “Not long before, I’d dropped out of a packaging degree which had left me completely cold,” says Nick, “but here everything seemed to come together. To be able to harvest and process natural materials to make beautiful vessels and panels was just incredible.”
Now based near Petersfield, Nick splits his time between making charcoal drawings of trees (often using charcoal he has made rom twigs of his subject tree) and bark weaving, using strips of Western red cedar or sweet chestnut bark, which he harvests himself from local woodlands. It is this element that he loves most about the bark work – that connection with the woods in springtime. “I love all the sights and sounds,” he says, “the bluebells, the smell of the damp earth and that sense of things going on underfoot – there’s something very animalistic about it.”
Once he has skinned and peeled the bark from the trunk of his chosen tree (“the crucial thing is to harvest the bark when the sap is rising,” he says, “as that allows it to peel easily from the wood beneath”), it is rolled along its length and left to dry – an important stage to avoid any shrinkage in the final pieces.
Having meticulously worked out his pattern on graph paper, he then soaks the bark and cuts it into strips of the desired size, splitting each strip once or twice to achieve the required thickness, and dying around half of them in iron vinegar to achieve the jet black hue he loves. “I like to have everything worked out before I start,” says Nick. “It’s more economical, and it means I don’t have to stop and start.”
This is important to Nick as, in both his bark work and his drawings, he is always striving for perfection. “I just want to do things as well as I possibly can,” he says. It seems that people are finally starting to take notice. In 2021, one of his baskets – an extraordinary cedar bark arrow quiver – was awarded second place in the prestigious ‘Basket of the Year’ competition run by the Basketmakers Association and the Worshipful Company of Basketmakers.
Last year he won the Cockpit Basketmakers’ Award, and exhibited his bark work at The New Craftmaker exhibition as part of the London Design Festival, and his drawings at Linley’s showroom in Belgravia. To his great delight, his work also made it into a national collection when the renowned botanical art authority Shirley Sherwood acquired one of his drawings of a standing dead sweet chestnut tree.
His professional aim for the next couple of years is to take part in the renowned Collect Art Fair at Somerset House, but his overarching ambition is more immediate. “If I can get people to look more closely at nature and their environment,” he says, “then my hope is that they might start to take more care of it.”
Useful information
Find out more about Nick McMillen’s work at mcmillenart.co.uk
