Nicholas Burns
Creative Arts at Royal College of Art
Nicholas David Burns’ work is grounded in sensory perception — shaped by his lived experience as an autistic artist and his deep bond with the tactile world. His artistic practice explores how we each navigate the world through different cognitive and sensory realities, shaped by individual modes of perception, sensation, and experience. His process, which he calls touch-walking, is an act of sensory listening — an attempt to dissolve boundaries between the human and non-human, and to open new ways of perceiving through a neurodiverse lens. Nicholas works primarily with medium and large format film photography and uses liquid light – a chemical emulsion allowing darkroom printing on any surface – to leave a photographic translation of how the body remembers through contact, gesture, and vibration.
Work by Nicholas Burns
- Light in the Polaroid
There's something wonderful about the format of instant photo - in a world of smartphone snapshots that will never exist in our hands, the physicality of the instant photo feels special. In an attempt to translate this physicality in some form, I have kept the scratches, dust and fingerprints…
- Fruit Salad
Does a dictionary really describe love? Made in collaboration with artists who identify with non-monogamous and polyamorous sexualities, the work challenges singular definitions of love, asking each artist to define their own definitions through fruit. The work is inspired by iconoclastic…
- I Want to Reach Out To You
Supported by the 2024 Gucci Scholarship for Photography, and nominated for the 2025 Hahnemühle Student Award. Autism isn't just about social difficulties—it's about unique sensory experiences. 'Stimming'—repetitive movements like rocking or fidgeting—is often misunderstood but is crucial for…
- Breathe
Taking inspiration from Laura Mark's writings in 'Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media', this work imagines sensory experience as breath, the oscillation between optical and haptic viewing.
- These Liminal Spaces
The space between human, non-human, and light. Shortlisted work for the 2025 Jaguar Art Awards: https://media.jaguar.com/news/2025/06/jaguar-art-awards-shortlist-announced "Nicholas’s series challenges the restrictive conventions of modern photography; by advancing the film while the shutter…
- £2000 start-up giveaway
We launched a £2000 start-up award to give back to students with big ideas.