An interdisciplinary artist, Mical Noelson’s practice encompasses painting, drawing, digital work, and site-responsive interventions. Born and raised in London of English and Caribbean descent, he studied Art & Design at Camberwell College of Arts and briefly at Chelsea College of Art under the tutelage of Angela de la Cruz and Jeffrey Dennis. Following his departure from art school, he spent several years making and performing music and collaborating on experimental projects, before relocating to Berlin in 2012 to devote himself fully to visual art.

Working across both physical and virtual media, Noelson investigates the tension between raw gesture and narrative form. Whether kneading pigment into paper, layering digital brushstrokes on screen, or scattering “dirt” onto a canvas, his mark-making preserves evidence of its own creation—fingerprints, scratches, and flurries of motion that reveal the artist’s hand. He often develops multiple works in parallel, permitting ideas to incubate and mutate; many pieces are destroyed in successive editing “waves” until only the most charged moments remain, distilled to their expressive essence.

Text occupies a crucial role in Noelson’s work. He appropriates lines drawn from mythological tales, historical records, or the slang of contemporary life, pairing them with abstraction to generate uncanny juxtapositions. The words themselves possess an intrinsic poetry that guides the viewer’s gaze across the surface even as they subvert meaning—each title or snippet is drawn from his dense sketchbooks, simultaneously invoking and undermining narrative expectations.

Since entering the blockchain in April 2021, Noelson has extended these concerns into augmented-reality sculptures and digital paintings. His AR objects hover between relic and apparition, inviting audiences to question the texture of the “real” and the virtual. Yet his approach remains consistent: he treats digital files as he would sheets of paper or stretches of canvas, allowing for multiple revisions, deletions, and serendipitous accidents to shape the final work.

Underlying Noelson’s entire practice is a fascination with “dirtiness”—the notion that an object carries a history, that it was never pristine or new. By deliberately preserving traces of process and decay, he evokes an uncanny relic quality that keeps the viewer’s eye in motion, pondering the life the piece has lived. His methodology is at once archaeological and speculative: he excavates marks and words, then recombines them into ghostly artifacts from a future myth.

Ultimately, Noelson’s work poses the questions: What stories do our gestures tell when stripped to their rawst forms? And how do text and texture together conjure meaning beyond representation? Through paint, pencil, pixel, and dirt, he creates work that feels both intimately human and mysteriously other—an invitation to dwell in the space between creation and ruin