HEATH NOCK
RITUALS OF THE MODERN MIDDLE CLASs
19.09.25 ~05.10.25
Rituals of the Modern Middle Class is a survey of the absurdity embedded in the daily habits, routines, and pastimes of Western middle-class life. Spanning the cultural memory of the 1970s through to the 1990s, Nock’s paintings transform seemingly ordinary activities into strange, almost theatrical rituals. They reveal how repetition, conformity, and consumer desire shape everyday existence.
Nock’s interest in ritual stems from his own sense of estrangement from it. Born into a Romani circus family with Swiss heritage, he grew up travelling the showman’s circuit across Australia. His childhood was defined by constant movement, disruption, and the transient bonds of small, shifting communities. From this vantage point, the stable and repetitive lives of others — classmates, neighbours, the broader middle class — appeared curiously ordered and alien. This outsider’s perspective became the cornerstone of his artistic practice. It produced a desire to understand, and at times parody, the routines that structure contemporary life.
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The works in this series draw on personal and found imagery including advertising, family photographs, and snapshots of leisure culture. Nock fragments and re-composes this material, cropping his sources to isolate telling details and create ambiguous, half-remembered moments. These images invite viewers to insert themselves into the scene. The blurriness of his brushwork amplifies this effect. Unlike the sharp lines of advertising or illustration, his soft edges leave room for doubt and interpretation. The result is an oscillation between recognition and estrangement, where familiarity is unsettled by an undertone of absurdity.
Smoking, for example, recurs as a central motif. In works such as Beach Smokers (Pink), figures appear bathed in the harsh glare of summer light, their gestures poised around cigarettes angled like competing gender symbols. Here smoking is less a matter of addiction than of performance. It becomes a ritualised act of seduction, conversation, and self-fashioning, derived as much from advertising mythologies as from lived experience.
Other paintings examine the ritualistic aspects of sport and leisure. Baseball, with its codified gestures, suspenseful pauses, and communal spectatorship, is reimagined not only as a pastime but as a ceremony of anticipation and repetition. Bodybuilding is likewise framed as an almost absurd devotion. The daily cultivation of muscles is not for labour or survival, but for aesthetic display. These works highlight the ways in which middle-class rituals often orbit consumer culture, entertainment, and spectacle, rather than community or spirituality.
Nostalgia plays a critical role in Nock’s practice. Yet his nostalgia is not for an era he wishes to revive. Instead, it functions as a reflective device: a ladder for looking back in order to measure the distance travelled, a means of situating the present within the echoes of the past. His works manipulate memory, collaging fragments of the everyday into new narratives that simultaneously recall and reinvent lived experience.
In this light, Rituals of the Modern Middle Class does not celebrate opulence or glamour. Rather, it turns its gaze toward the ordinary individual and the small, often absurd practices that structure their lives. The paintings ask: why do we attach such importance to these rituals? What does it mean that so many of our collective ceremonies—smoking, sport, fitness—are tethered not to land, community, or tradition, but to consumerism and self-image?
Nock’s paintings suggest that within these seemingly banal acts lies both humour and unease. By reframing the familiar as absurd, he compels us to question the foundations of our own rituals, and to reflect on what, if anything, gives them meaning.
