| Society

Surviving Lockdown: What Do We Surround Ourselves With?

The next instalment in our series of interviews to pick up tips from the arts to help get through this unusual period.

© Nicola Anthony, Pass It On, 2013

[dropcap style=”font-size:100px;color:#992211;”]I[/dropcap]n the second video of the series, visual artist Nicola Anthony continues where we left off with more tips from creative coach Deborah Henry Pollard.

As an elected member of the Royal Society of Sculptors, Nicola Anthony has been invited all over the world to work with NGOs, art institutions, and architects to create art which expresses the human experience of isolation, displacement, disconnection or disenfranchisement.

This year her art has featured in the New York Times, Interior Design magazine and Architectural Record. In recent years she had a solo exhibition at Singapore Art Museum, exhibited in the Kuala Lumpur Biennale, and installed public sculptures in Los Angeles, Colorado and Singapore. She has been practicing for 15 years and created exhibitions and commissions for art institutions and cultural foundations in Ireland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Myanmar, USA, UK, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia. She studied at Loughborough University in the UK and Central Saint Martins, (UAL).

Using fire techniques on paper and metal alongside an innate ability to transform words into messages of profundity, her work is a journal of a thousand souls. She collects human testimonies, empowering and transforming them into contemporary art. From the playful to the heart-wrenching, each artwork is shaped by the narrative it contains. 

Some works take the form of text sculptures, giving glimpses into the effects of displacement and intergenerational trauma. Others portray traces of lost stories and unheard voices through burnt, worn and layered surfaces. She focuses her work on untold narratives, collective memory, displacement, migration and place memory. Anthony has a specific interest in the nature of the ‘archive’ of stories, language, memory processes, and the way we may all experience time differently.

Image © Nicola Anthony, Pass It On, 2013

Nicola talks with art critic Tabish Khan in part three of our Surviving Lockdown series here

Sponsor

Comments are closed.

Our weekly newsletter

Sign up to get updates on articles, interviews and events.