Nell Nicholas is an English artist working across large-scale painting, drawing and ceramics. She studied at City & Guilds of London Art School, Falmouth University and UCL.
Her practice explores the ways people construct meaning and significance around the things that surround them. Drawing on anthropology, archaeology and evolutionary psychology, she is particularly interested in humanity’s impulse to set certain objects, places, people and rituals apart from ordinary life — and the recurring symbols, hierarchies and forms of devotion that emerge in the process. Her work is driven as much by an attraction to the beauty and strangeness of these behaviours as by a desire to understand them: a beauty found in recognising patterns of human behaviour across otherwise disparate places, cultures and periods. Her imagery moves freely between the sacred and the everyday, from architecture and devotional objects to shop signs, football shirts and other fragments of contemporary life.
Nell draws from a broad visual archive spanning historical, archaeological and contemporary sources, alongside material gathered through travel and direct observation. She undertakes long and often unusual journeys as part of this process, including travelling by canoe along the Mississippi, Hudson and Usumacinta rivers, and participating in marine and bat conservation on Mafia Island, Tanzania. These experiences feed into an expanding visual vocabulary through which images from different cultures, periods and contexts are brought into proximity.
Collaboration with specialist and traditional makers forms an important part of Nicholas’s practice. Her recent exhibitions, projects and collaborations include her solo exhibition WINGS at Soho Revue, London; residencies at the Slade School of Fine Art and Camden Art Centre; work with OOF Gallery and Tottenham Hotspur FC in London, Cerámica Suro and JO-HS Gallery in Mexico City, and Cyprus College of Art; and the creation of a large-scale mural for Comal in New York City. She is currently developing an ongoing collaboration with a traditional pottery in Morocco and has collaborated with traditional silversmiths in Chiapas, Mexico, allowing techniques, materials and visual languages rooted in particular places to enter the work through the people who practise them.
Nicholas is one of four recipients of an Honorary Medal from City & Guilds of London Art School. Other notable awards include the Clyde & Co Art Award and the Ivun Ravndal Travel Prize. She was also runner-up for The Art Newspaper’s Best Thesis award for her research into Michael Rakowitz’s Fourth Plinth reconstruction of a Mesopotamian Lamassu, examining the work in relation to British imperial history, the Iraq War and the destruction and displacement of Iraqi cultural heritage.
Nell currently works from a former reading room and chapel in the Surrey Hills.
