Artist statement

the story behind the art…

“I am fascinated with language, stories, the search for truth, linguistics and semiotics. My artistic practice transforms life stories, oral history and collective memory into contemporary art, I like to dig beneath the surface to find voices which are often forgotten, erased, or omitted. To gather stories I borrow methodologies from the disciplines of linguistics, evolutionary biology, horology, anthropology, and even data mining.

I have always felt a sense of otherness, which leads me to be curious about how we understand ourselves in the wider context, as part of a community, a society, an ecosystem, the Earth or the universe. My recent work has investigated the subjects of migration, genocide, disenfranchised communities and asylum seekers, as well as the field of research around Emergent Behaviour in groups. (An emergent behaviour is something that is a non-obvious side effect of bringing together a combination of capabilities or actions — it occurs in nature in the unplanned coordination of a flock of birds, a shoal of fish, at a molecular level in the behaviours of water as a wave or flow, in the behaviour of AI and computer programmes, and in human society in both positive and harmful ways.)

Outside of the subjects of otherness and togetherness, I still find a poetry in that which is not one thing or the other: those liminal moments, textures, memories, or experiences which can’t be neatly categorised, or which exist in two states at once. My work often looks at people who find themselves on the edge - at a physical or emotional border, at the edge of sanity, existing outside of time, or simply feeling like an outsider.

I enjoy gathering my source material in many ways: interviewing people or gathering their fragments of memories through other methods; seeking the essence of society by looking at the history of our collective google queries; working with archives of knowledge or aural histories; collecting the stories of nature through sound recordings and digital capture; exploring less verbal narratives and experiences such as awe and serendipity through experiments and recordings; collaborating with poets, scientists, linguists and research bodies. The second part of my process involves retelling, re-presenting, or abstracting these findings. This sometimes results in publications, text sculpture, text collage or soundscapes.

Recently I have concentrated on stainless steel text sculptures, or hand- burned paper sculptures and drawings. To me both forms are either an act of telling a story, or realising that some stories are unutterable, erased, censored, self-censored, or lost. Each artwork is shaped by the life story it contains - multilayered, fragile, suspended in time.

I burn the paper with joss sticks to create imagery in the voids, and I cut and form metal with heat to create text. Other works also incorporate glass vessels in which I suspend kinetic text sculptures, or sound artworks which are another form of storytelling. I like the natural origins of my materials - from earth, minerals and trees, and that these can be altered through my application of heat rather than paint.

My work has led me to be an experienced collector of testimonies and oral histories. In 2017 I launched the platform humanarchiveproject.com and have since gathered thousands of stories. My research has also resulted in various publications, books, (and other archives of human testimonies, life stories, secrets, bird song recordings, paper aeroplanes, confessions, memories and spoken word.) The concept of the archive is important to my practice, and as I look back over its evolution I can see that my work has always been about collecting ephemeral things and re-imagining that information in a poetic or visual way. The Archive can be an analogy for individual or collective memory.

Since 2016 my fascination with human stories led me to work with official archives and NGOs. I seek testimonies from those who are often silenced, censored or ignored. I have a particular focus on how trauma leads people to experience time differently and store memory abnormally.

I am interested in the archive that exists within each individual mind, each family, each generation. Recently, I have begun researching the internal ‘archiving’ of trauma and the movement of this through time, known as transgenerational trauma (and also linked to the field of epigenetics - the study of how our behaviours and environment can cause changes that affect the way human genes work).

My most recent public sculpture was commissioned by The Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles, an institution which was founded by Steven Spielberg and works to develop empathy, understanding and respect. 'Shoah' means Holocaust, and the resulting stainless steel text sculpture features the life story of Jona Goldrich, a Holocaust survivor who escaped from Poland during WW2.

In my spare time I collect paper aeroplanes, proverbs, poems, riddles, birdsong recordings, curses, confessions, laments, praises, prayers, prophecies, public announcements, and narratives.”

Nicola Anthony, 2019

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