La plume
de ma tante When
my Great-Aunt Edith passed away we discovered a box full of
old dip-pen nibs. As she was one of the first female head
mistresses in Liverpool I found these objects poignant and
wished to create a small shrine to the influence her letters
must have had on many lives.
Epics In
these works I am exploring the dissemination of information,
questioning why some paths of enquiry are valid and others
aggressively ridiculed.
Using
the example of fairy tales, I highlight the fragmentation
of matrilineal lines of communication and the value of womens
words.
Abridged "Concepts
of the human body and of the collection are at the cutting
edge of postmodernist thinking. In her autobiographical
appropriation of these texts, Sarah Nicholson explores the
evocative and emotive quality of both. The installations
she creates are fascinating in detail and forceful in their
critical comments. She has succeeded in creating a powerful
critique of contemporary issues."
Professor
Susan Pearce, Dean of Arts, DeMontford University, 1997.
Casting
Futures
The
value placed on womens work is central to these works,
with their focus on the processes of domestic magic and
the links forged between the activities of the hands and
the rituals of fairy tales that lull the work along.
Fairy
tales spend so much time devaluing womens work and
yet insist that if you slave away in silence, like a good
girl, then your handsome prince will someday come and rescue
you from the drudgery of the kitchen. Yet without the bonds
formed and the wisdom passed on, from mother to daughter
during this time alone together, how would womens
escape from domestic confinement have been forged?
Cast
Away Collection
Media:
museum case, collected bottles, wax, text
Personal
and social memories are disseminated in many forms; here I
have focused on those that reach us via the museum display
and the activity of collecting.
Making
it up Dating form the 1930s this beautiful make-up box used
to belong to a Great Aunt of mine.
Collectanea
These four small boxes have been made and remade so often that
I cannot think of them as a fixed object. This combination of
text, glass, wax and light has the added element of luxurious,
sensuous velvet. It has been exhibited at the Stroud House Gallery,
Gloucestershire, as part of their first New Graduates (97)
exhibition and has been used as a cover image for the exhibition
Delicate Dissidence.
Wax
Works
Exhibited
at the Collins Gallery, Glasgow this early series of boxworks
considers the rituals of recording or discarding social and
personal histories, exploring our revealed or concealed natures.
Shadow
Boxes I think that the museum case is a study in the collecting
of shadows.