Tucked away in Kent, Nick Veasey’s studio is built like a bunker. Nick has spent the best part of three decades honing and developing a very specific approach to image making, he creates X-rays.

Nick’s large scale X-rays turn everyday objects or familiar scenes into something out of this world. A pair of trainers, a hat or a helicopter, a pair of hands become examinations of man made and natural architecture. We chatted to Nick about his artistic process and how nostalgia and honesty play a part in his work. 

Expecting to talk about X-rays, we actually ended up talking with Nick about honesty. Nick harnesses honesty as a way of seeing. He loves the idea that if you strip an object right back, past its surface, you find out how it was put together. The reality of the thing is revealed and it cannot lie. As Nick says, “we are all the same on the inside”.

Ask Nick about his artistic journey and he doesn’t describe a plan. Photography had always been his interest and passion, but he was never able to find the place where it quite clicked for him. When an opportunity emerged through his wife’s work to X-ray a coke can, the process gave Nick a way of working he hadn’t experienced. It all fell into place and he hasn’t stopped since...

Nick’s work feels full of nostalgia, his ‘Silver Arcade’ takes us back to the joys of younger years, and reveals the complexity of the machines we played with. The X-Ray leaves us with just the gesture; two kids completely absorbed. It’s nostalgic, but it’s not really about remembering the past, it's about remembering what it felt like to be that lost in something.

Nick is often still surprised by his own work. Sometimes the thing he imagines to be spectacular comes out flat as an X-ray, and something unremarkable is beautiful. He recently X-rayed a 1950’s bathing suit, not expecting much. It turned out to be beautiful, revealing the boning and stitching of a garment from a completely different era and laid bare in a way a photograph can’t achieve.

We live in a world obsessed with appearance, and Nick's work pushes back against that. Speaking on this he says "Everything is filmed and captured, particularly for women, and life shouldn't be like that, we are all made of the same stuff," he says. "That's the definition of love, to truly love someone you have to know them from the inside, what makes them tick. X-ray is a metaphor for that." Nick's work highlights his disregard for superficiality.

For Nick, his practice has changed the way he sees the world. “If I lie awake at night, images are flashing through my head, I’m trying to imagine what things might look like X-rayed and stripped down to their structure.”

Nick’s artwork shows us the inside of something we may have used everyday but never ‘properly seen’. You might have seen the hat, played the guitar, wore the headphones for years, all while not being able to see what is actually there under the surface.

Working with industrial radiation equipment on the scale that Nick needs is genuinely risky business, so safety sits at the centre of his process. Nick has a purpose built concrete chamber, the walls are 700mm, where he conducts the X-Rays. Nick wears a radiation monitor and has regular check ups to track his exposure. He’s known to the police, as machinery on the scale he has is bound to attract attention - that scale doesn't go unnoticed. And scale dictates time spent. The bigger the object, the longer the process is as the X-ray has to be built up piece by piece rather than all captured in one go.. A helicopter took him four years.

Asked about a dream project, he doesn't hesitate. "Space rocket."

Nick's path to his career wasn’t obvious and it shapes the advice he gives to artists starting out. “Dont be cynical, specialise and get properly good at one thing rather than spreading yourself thin”. He continues "It's an amazing world, we need to stop and look around at it,". 

Nick’s career has grown out of one process that refused to let him go, and nearly thirty years, a TED talk, several major exhibitions and four books later he’s still following his instincts. 

"Having the ideas isn't the problem," he says. "Let the ideas gestate. If they keep you up at night and don’t go away, do them."