NIKKI FOSTER

Tag: process

  • 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…

  • Work in Translation

    Dear fellow artist, I’m writing to you from 100 days of rain in Dublin, honestly, it feels biblical! It was difficult writing this letter as I am always anxious about writing because I’m never sure if I will get my point across clearly or articulate my work properly. I’ve had this hang-up since Camberwell, where…

  • 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…

  • Roadkill

    Strange childhood memories and how they linger. I keep getting images of roadkill in my head; January tends to have that effect. Not roadkill when it’s completely dead, but when it still has just enough life to drag itself off the road and into a ditch. I wonder what sort of roadkill I would be:…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…