What was your journey to becoming an artist?

In high school I loved art and was quite good at it but at that age I had personal problems and lack of motivation to really do anything with it. Also I went to a country high school where art wasn’t seen as a career. I ended up studying business – public relations and going to work in a suit everyday. I was quite successful at this but I looked at my managers who wanted to mold me to be like them and they hadn’t travelled and experience the world. So I took off for Europe living in Ireland and Scotland on a working visa. During this time I was exposed to incredible art in the museums and art galleries of Europe. I eventually returned to Australia with the conviction of studying art. I began with a Tafe course which gave me a great basic foundation in all aspects of Visual Art and then ended up moving to Tasmania to go to art school. I initially started thinking I would major in painting but saw that in printmaking you learnt some very sound technical knowledge and had access to facilities that are not easily accessible outside of art school.

This was all in my late 20s so I came to art later in life, but had a more solid life grounding, I don’t think I would have lasted if I went when I was younger. I was also fortunate to study at the Madrid School of Art on exchange for a year as part of my undergraduate degree. In 2015 I returned to art school to get my Honours and fell pregnant with my son halfway through, I finished honours and received First Class but was exhausted at the end and just wanted to make something simple and without all the justification that academic research requires. So I returned to embroidery as my way of continuing my arts practice when my son was born in 2016. When he was first born I thought I would never make art again I was so exhausted, but I soon realised when he was around 3 months that making art is something that keeps me balanced and is so interwoven into my existence that I needed to do something. I think becoming a mother, I wanted something that I can pick up and put down whilst I could steal moments when my son slept.

You depict pop icons from the 80s and 90s when mainstream culture was experienced very differently to how it is today. What’s your opinion on fame and celebrity in this age of narcissism and oversharing, where everyone is glued to ‘Love Island’ and it’s possible to become a celebrity overnight by leaking a sex tape…?

It is a very different scene now days. When I was growing up in country Victoria, in Australia, the only channels to experience music were via my dad and mum’s record collection (which was pretty good as far as parents collections go) and the radio and a music program here in Australia called RAGE which broadcasts the top 40 film clips. So I think that this type of exposure influenced my interest in ‘art’ in the forms of record covers and the narration of film clips. Today it does feel much more immediate and almost overwhelming that there are a LOT of celebrities who are famous for not really achieving much at all. It is fascinating in one way but perhaps I am being controversial in saying that it can produce mediocre talent out there in the world. I watched an episode of Love Island whilst staying in a hotel (we don’t have mainstream TV in my house) and it made me feel ill, just the narcissism and culture that these kinds of programs are promoting. I feel for the younger generation growing up in this culture that a lot of the time it is all about image and presenting the ideal online. However, there is a much broader voice today than there was in the 80s and 90s. The movies and music culture was much more ‘white male’ point of view which meant there were a lot of voices unheard. And really it is has always been about sex – it is just more easily distributed now.

Social media is fantastic for artists to promote their work, but how do you feel about it personally? Is the oversharing too much? And how do you feel about it as a parent and the impact it will have on your child in the future?

Social media is great for artists but it does also present problems in terms of copyright infringement etc. It has been really exciting for me connecting with people from all over the world, and especially living on a small island at the bottom of Australia. Also I think that social media breaks down the walls of patriarchal art institutions where in Australia (and worldwide) female artists are significantly underrepresented. On the down side I have quite a few people comment on my works to their friends that they are going to copy and make it for them. People perhaps don’t see or understand that the work is not just an image, but this is my career. I do find social media exhausting at times and I think as an artist I have to be careful not to get caught up in the ‘likes’. To continue to grow as an artist I have to be comfortable to create and experiment with things that some people or a lot of people might not like. Social media presents instant gratification of likes that could perhaps lead to becoming stuck in what people approve of. I haven’t had a personal Facebook account for over 5 years now because I felt there was too much oversharing and I wanted to see people on the street and have real conversations with them to know what they were up to in their lives. I do keep a personal private account seperate to my artist Instagram so that I am not sharing my personal life with the world. I think that sometimes hearing other peoples stories online may reach out and help someone else so it has its benefits, but for me I would rather keep my own personal life separate and for the people I know in real life.

As a mother I am very aware about what goes out there of my son, for the basic fact that children don’t have a say in the matter in terms of how imagery of them is shared. My partner and I are perhaps ‘retro’ parents in the fact that we make sure our son knows the analogue world, he has his own film camera, he does embroidery and painting with real paint (not on the iPad). I don’t know if this will help him in the future and it is hard to imagine what the online future looks like, it has changed relatively quickly from when we got the first computers when I was in high school. But hopefully giving him learning in all elements of the world and not just digital will help him remain grounded.

Embroidery is having a sort of revolution at the moment, what does it mean to you to be working with embroidery at this time?

It is a really exciting time for textile artists. As a self taught embroidery artist, and this being a new medium for me to explore, it is so inspiring to see so many other artists out there using the medium of embroidery in new and exciting ways. The more I work in embroidery (and still receive comments from people who haven’t seen the work, degrade the medium) it drives to me to continue working in this medium combined with other techniques to bring it more into the ‘fine art’ field. In the next couple of years this is of particular interest to me as I want to challenge the ‘paint only = fine art’ and I have quiet a few ideas to use embroidery in a painterly way. I also think there is something empowering about using a medium that has been historically downgraded as women’s craft, and present it on a larger scale and in unexpected subject matter. My recent exhibtion in Hobart I received a lot of feedback that people assumed the embroideries were quite small as that is what they expected from embroidery.

Do you sell prints of your embroideries?

I did sell prints for a while but found this unsuccessful, and I also think that making prints perhaps degrades the work a bit rather than saying, yes this is a work of art and unique and should be paid for accordingly. It may just be the art school hang over still putting that in my head, but I also feel that it doesn’t work for me, taking so long to make something and then turning around and mass producing copies of it. But this is just my opinion and it is great if other artists do so, it can be a good source of income.

Describe a typical day in the studio.

Well I only really get one day being a mum, my partners parents take my son for the day. Usually I have a work on the go and continue to work on that listening to podcasts or music depending on my mood and drinking buckets of green tea. Some studio days I may need to draw up a design for a new work or do a colour study for the work. I try to take breaks as embroidery can be quite taxing on your wrists, shoulders and eyes. I also may move around the house depending on which room has the best light for working. We have a studio in our garage as well and if I need to do some painting I will work in there. Any computer work is done in the morning as that is when my brain is fired up and ready to go.

Is being an artist your full-time job?

I work part time at an art shop. Being an artist means intermittent money coming in and placing all the money making on my creative practice I feel would be too much pressure to be free to create whatever I wanted. Working in an art shop means I am in contact with some big Tasmanian artists and the reality is that most have to have another income source. That is why I think residencies are so important as they allow a concentrated time to think and play without the stress of paying bills or having the daily chores to worry about.

 What direction would you like to take your work in the future?

I am looking forward to exploring the combination my learned skills in painting, printmaking and embroidery to see where I can push my work. I would like the work to become a bit more experimental and I always do a shift from realist to abstract and back again. I think that residencies will help me explore the ideas I have floating around my head a bit more and solidify in which direction my work will shift next.

Head to Nicole’s website to see more of her artwork, and follow her on Instagram here.

This week’s recommended read: The Subversive Stitch by Rozsika Parker. A must read for any feminist fiber art lover!

‘Rozsika Parker’s re-evaluation of the reciprocal relationship between women and embroidery has brought stitchery out from the private world of female domesticity into the fine arts, created a major breakthrough in art history and criticism, and fostered the emergence of today’s dynamic and expanding crafts movements’.

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