Heather Nicol

"Special Arrangements" is a body of work that playfully defamiliarizes everyday objects.  

Through the delicate stacking of glassware - gleaned from the local glut of castoff household treasures - the work explores our impulses to collect, save, purge, and replace. Items that were formerly desirable, but may have been damaged, separated from their sets, or gone out of style draw attention to the temporality of value and privilege. Chewing gum-inspired adhesive material and bits of crumpled paper add a sense of haphazard fragility to the constructions, and may evoke sticky childhood lessons in proper manners. Highly precarious, viewers are cued to be sensitive to the ever-present potential for calamity or loss. The artist's commingling of tactile pleasure and anxiety reflect her ambivalent relationship to culturally specific notions of domesticity, beauty and taste. Her repurposed juxtapositions remind us that new relationships are forever possible, even for the lost and broken.

Paper House series, 2016-2017

Paperhouse Studio is an experimental arts studio offering workspace, classes and workshops devoted to paper. They are located in the same building as Heather, Artscape Youngplace, Toronto. In 2016 they invited a group of artists to make new works with their technical support and guidance, some of which were selected for an exhibition at another wonderful Artscape Youngplace neighbor, Typology Projects. 

2Rooms Contemporary Art Projects,

Duntara, Newfoundland

Director, Catherine Beaudette

Cheers! This small body of work celebrates moments of social engagement, and ways that we interface with everyday objects in our lives. The stemware is filled with a variety of substances, from resins and oils, to Koolade and medications.

Brief Lives 2012-2013 is a suite of 14 wall relief panels that reflect on domestic materials and their relationships to display and social identity. They celebrate and question feminist reclamations, nostalgic tenderness, and the histories embedded in the objects from which they are assembled, while carrying on their aesthetic traditions through transformation into works of art.  

Hidden in a luscious, bejeweled object, six speakers emanate a documentary-inspired multi-track audio score. Pubescent girls share thoughts about weddings, a vehicle for examining how issues of identity, desire and anxiety interface with cultural forces of institution and commodity.

Salon was an intermittent, ongoing body of small-scale works, begun in 2004 and completed in a unified installation at KWT Contemporary, Toronto in 2011. These mixed media pieces include delicate lighting elements that shift and change via arduino electronic devices. The discreet works were linked through their wiring, which was enveloped in an umbilical cord-like fabric casing, creating an organic, unifying code of display.