From the first thought to the final piece, we step inside the creative mind of Tomi Alan Nurse, a multidisciplinary artist whose wire sculptures are built from a wild combination of mythology, self-doubt, and the mind that thrives in chaos.
There is a moment, somewhere between the initial spark and the finished work, that most artists struggle to describe but all go through. It is not quite inspiration and not quite craft, it is the middle ground where ideas bend, break and reform.
For Tomi Alan Nurse, a multidisciplinary artist from Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and England, that middle ground seems to be everything.
The idea before the idea.
Tomi’s most recent work, Serpent’s Conquest, began as something far simpler. “This piece in itself started as a mountain with one snake coming out of it,” he explains. What it became was two headless serpents coiled around three mountains beneath a single projection that showcases videos from above down onto the sculpture.
“It’s kind of meant to be a kind of social and political commentary, but at the same time, just philosophical commentary on division, like winning over, or its conquest over, harmony, or oneness.” In Tomi’s telling, “the rigidity or unwillingness to change is kind of antithetical to the creative process, because it’s supposed to be creative, making new ideas, and if you’re stuck on your old ideas, you’re not going to get anywhere.”
One of the last decisions he made was to remove the snake’s heads entirely, a choice he describes as giving the sculpture “such a more powerful form.” It’s a small, decisive act that tells you everything about how Tomi works in constant negotiations with the materials in front of him.
The conversation extends to the question of where his ideas come from in the first place. Tomi describes a creative process that is neither purely internal nor purely reactive to the outside world, but collaborative between the two. “I take that and run it through like a personal lens or like a framework,” he explains, “so that I can come up with more interesting ideas.”
His research feeds the framework he speaks of, particularly with YouTube channels dedicated to religious studies, Western esotericism, human psychology, and the mythology he has been developing across pieces. “I love to, like, learn about religion because a lot of my most recent work is on religion, as well as this channel called ‘Esoterica’, which is also about Western esotericism.” Showing how his resulting sculptures are dense with reference, even if they’re not so illustrative.
Two hundred and fifty hours.
The making of ‘Serpent’s Conquest’ took Tomi 250 hours. “The 250 hours didn’t feel like 250 hours, really, because I enjoyed making it.” What he describes is a kind of dual consciousness, one part of his mind is on automatic, repeating the physical task of wrapping wire, while another part ranges freely, listening to podcasts, deepening the ideas around the work, occasionally stepping back to take the whole thing in.
“The stepping back is when you’re actually coming up with something,” he says. It is a rhythm he returns to throughout our conversation, the distinction between doing and seeing, between the close work of making and the wider perspective that gives it meaning. For Tomi, the two are inseparable. The hours of repetitive craft are not a means to an end but the conditions under which ideas develop and deepen. “A lot of the things I’m listening to or doing are around the same, like, philosophical ideas and social ideas. And so, I’m deepening a lot of the time, what I, the ideas around the piece were also, while working on it, with my hands at the same time.”
His inner critic is loudest in those moments when he steps back from a piece. “It’s like a critic a lot of the time,” the voice in his head he admits, “and it’s the loudest when I step back and look at the piece.” The self-doubt Tomi describes is not paralysing but productive, a sharpening tool, the voice that asks whether the work is actually doing what it set out to do. “I think self-doubt is a useful tool in that it makes you your harshest critic,” he reflects, “and it makes you want to make your work better.”
Here is an artist whose sculptures are, by his own description, assertive and imposing, designed to “state themselves in the space.” And yet he’s debating, at every step, whether they deserve that space at all. “Whether it does what I’m trying to get it to do,” is how he frames it. Not a question of technical ability, but of meaning. Tomi’s partner, Adonis, put it into words, “The process of the work and the time put into it, really says as much as the actual piece.”
The Meaning of Wire.
When asked if he could describe his creative mind in visual terms, he reaches, instinctively, for ‘wire’. “It’s these connected ideas strung between by thinner pieces of wire,” he says. “They’re not straight. They’re all bent a little bit in a very human way.” The image he conjures is of something organised but not orderly “It’s organised, but there’s a lot of chaos in the organisation of the things.” Coherent from a distance, but chaotic up close. “You look at a certain thing, and it might look a little messy,” he says, “but you zoom out, and there’s a piece there.”
“Meaning in art is often owned by the viewer,” he adds, a conviction that runs through both the work and the way he talks about making it. The references he builds into his sculptures are personal, sometimes arcane, drawn from traditions that most viewers will not immediately recognise. But the piece itself, he insists, should be experienced before it is decoded. The title, the symbols, the form, they are all there, and the viewer’s job is to move through them and emerge with something of their own. “I don’t want somebody to end up coming out with the same exact things I come out of my piece with.”
That generosity, the willingness to let go of the intended meaning and trust the audience to make their own, is Tomi’s process. Is the form of his argument. And the question Tomi himself can’t quite stop asking is whether the work, in the end, deserves the space it takes up.