NIKKI FOSTER

Tag: art

  • Flow

    I just read Fake Whale’s ‘The Ontology of Flow’ recommended by artist Ian Mc Inerney on Merrigan’s Substack. It’s a really great read, very apt about the conditions of our online experience, particularly in relation to art making and the consumption of imagery. But how does it make me feel or think as an artist?…

  • In Conversation

    I have become very focused on painting from photographs. Photographs I have taken, which is a change because up until last year it was predominantly from my mother’s collection of photographs, taken from a large plastic bag which she had planned to throw away. I don’t know why she wanted to throw them away. I…

  • Very Base

    Recently I’ve been thinking about iterations. I think it makes sense to think about iterations when considering our familial routines and rhythms: doing the same things, using the same objects. I’ve been avoiding spending money on new materials, so after running out of water-based oil paints I’ve just been using up my acrylics. Any acrylics…

  • Everything Colliding

    The first thing I ever sat down and properly painted was a horse. I think I must have been 13. It was quite funny because I didn’t particularly like horses. On a visit to the New Forest as a younger child with my family, I broke away from them and approached a group of horses…

  • Ephemera

    Last week, I found a Ferrero Rocher wrapper tucked inside a library book. It felt like a small interruption, a trace of someone else’s moment. I love this residue sometimes found in library books: the folded corners of pages, the underlined passages of text. I began thinking about the idea of found ephemera and the…

  • Wide Open

    My daughter moves through the house aloofly, often on the make, keeping herself on the periphery. It is strange to see. I flatter myself by questioning: is this why I took so many photographs of her last year? Some sort of pre-emptive foresight that she’d soon be more independent, moving out of the fold. My…

  • The Green Room

    Getting off the train at Bournemouth Station, the town strikes me more as a city now when I come home. There is a beehive-like cluster around the ticket gates before we are released into the dark. I nip over to ASDA to get treats: whiskey, beer, gin, chocolate. I have it in my head to…

  • A Minor Threat

    While sitting with a woman I know this week, I complimented her on her nails which were perfectly shaped and pillar box red. She thanked me and looked at my nails in turn, before averting her eyes and complimenting my runners instead. My hands are dry with paint in the cracks around the nails: I…

  • Gaps

    Recently a subplot of a novel I was reading caught my attention and filtered into the work.  The female protagonist has a child with a man whom she loves but doesn’t fully understand.  He tends to be melancholic, and it frustrates her.  When she learns of his affair, she moves away with the child, but as the child grows, she watches them closely.  The child later shows signs of…

  • A way in?

    If you choose a group of photographs that have this feeling of ‘punctum’ then I think the only way to prevent the paintings becoming illustrations of the photographs is to remove them from view. Then it becomes almost like a memory game. What forms will remain impressed on your memory and make their way into…