Barbara Nicholls

"My work operates across a broad range of artistic categories, employing a wide span of processes and techniques to address a number of engaging critical issues: questions of aesthetic form, surface and depth, chance and order, the handmade and the readymade, the archaeological and the cartographic, and the relations between work and play. My approach, both to the subject matter with which I engage and to its material rendition is allegorical or metaphorical, rather than literal or mimetic.The objects I produce be they primarily two dimensional or three dimensional forms, may thus be regarded as translations or complex developments with their own internal logic, structures which have, to a considerable degree, moved away from their original sources whilst nonetheless connecting to them through inference and analogy.

An individual work can display several, apparently contradictory methods of “inscription”, of technical know-how within its frame: drawing, painting, routing, folding and unfurling, tracing and tracking, sanding down and sharpening up. The result may be a multilayered, overly physical cluster of densely packed substances or, conversely, something minimal, neatly stripped down.

More recently since 2011 I have exclusively used watercolour on paper. These works continue established themes of geology, mapping and topography. The watercolour paint settles onto the thick sheets of paper creating a geological terrain, climate and topography of paint and ground. They are in part investigations into the scientific properties of watercolour whilst also being instinctive reactions to the process of using watercolour. The paintings are poured, cajoled, blown and left alone to become records of colourful events reflecting the relationship between myself and the materials." 

Exhibited at Griffin Gallery in Water + Colour in February 2014.

EDUCATION

Doctorate in Fine Art – University of East London, London, 2006

MA Fine Art – University of East London, London, 1998

BA (Hons) Fine Art – Goldsmiths College, 1986

Foundation studies in Art & Design – Manchester Polytechnic 

(Last updated 11.12.2014)