Nathan Andrew McCarthy is a visual artist and community organiser living and working on Gadigal Country, in Sydney, Australia.

Originally from Bateau Bay on the Central Coast of New South Wales, Nathan’s practice draws deeply from his formative experiences immersed in nature. His work meditates on figures suspended within landscapes—subdued by motion, memory, and the quiet persistence of the natural world. As a child, he roamed creek-beds, swam in brackish swamps, and communed with submerged aquatic life. Alongside his twin brother, he developed a private language of gestures and marks, drawing with the simple tools of childhood and engaging with the raw, unfiltered essence of life.

Nathan works across a range of materials—oil stick, toothy gesso, collage, and acrylic—often layering and distorting forms in a process that treats art as both language and excavation. Visual expression became one of his earliest and most vital means of communication, a deeply personal syntax that continues to shape his creative voice.

In 2025, Nathan completed a month-long residency at Landslide Gallery in the Blue Mountains. There, he expanded his ongoing series of ethereal, lingering figures—bodies abstracted and obscured by foliage, shadow, and the living terrain. His work from the residency evokes themes of displacement, transformation, and the blurred boundary between self and environment. Through experiments in collage and traditional media, Nathan explored how nature envelops and reclaims the human form, creating compositions that feel both haunted and tender.

Nathan’s evolving practice continues to explore the edges of identity, memory, and land—drawing from both the personal and the imaginary, always in quiet conversation with the natural world.