NIKKI FOSTER

Tag: Photography

  • 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…

  • Just Outside the Frame

    Motherhood exists in constant flux. Caregiving shifts as my children grow, and I face a reckoning with how quickly intimacy transforms into independence. My focus is on the everyday, moments that might pass unnoticed. Taking a photograph requires me to step outside the moment, even when my role as a mother usually demands I stay…

  • 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…

  • Sitting

    My son finds sitting for me hard  and being in my painting room  frustrating  He says, ‘What is the point of all this?  All these pictures, if they’re just going to sit here?’  I try to reassure him   Its ok, I enjoy it  The point is to try to see better  They might go somewhere  He wants a fiver for sitting for me  For him now   things are…

  • 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…

  • Sunday afternoon

    Transcribed from my writing above: Tackled 3 loads of washing, 2 wet, 1 dry, folded and put away, Eden waited by the bed, while I walked from draws to wardrobes, the boys built a fort slide in their bedroom, I cleaned mold off the bathroom tiles, then I jumped with them, on the mess of…