NICKY FOREMAN.

BORN 1970, WAITARA, TARANAKI.

ELAM SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS, AUCKLAND UNIVERSITY 1988-91 GRADUATED B.F.A 1992

Nicky Foreman first exhibited in Auckland and New Plymouth in 1992. In these early exhibitions she focused solely on the Taranaki landscape. From the onset she worked in a compartmentalized format. In the same vein as life many sections need to be tended to in order make up the whole in a harmonious way. Within this way of working Foreman can play off order against chaos and abstract against figurative. The work can be viewed twofold- in small icon like pieces and also as the whole. The difficulty in this lays in creating an innate sense of balance wherein the viewers’ eye is not pulled in any one direction but rather floats across the surface picking up different aspects.

Foreman focuses on the physical landscape and within this context looks at her personal family history as settlers in the Tikorangi area and the evidence of generations living in that landscape. At this time she built an extensive repetoire of signs and symbols; an image bank which she recycles and transforms. The multiple images mimic flashes of memory. Taking everyday mundane objects from the landscape she exalts and imbues them with a simple dignity in a not dissimilar manner to the still life painters of the 1800’s.

Since art school Foreman has used oil paint with an assemblage of other materials. She manipulates her materials and invents for herself new techniques that evolve through her everyday practice giving a sense of alchemy. Using gold, silver and copper leaf, wax, patinas, inks and shellacs she engenders tactile historical surfaces, tempting the viewer to reach out and touch.

In 1998 Foreman traveled to Ireland and France and from this time forward the Celtic and Catholic ancestry of her maternal family appears within her work. Her first contact with Renaissance works in the Louvre also had a strong influence in particular their use of precious materials, ritual and repetition. In her own form of ritual she has returned to France every year since 2001 and in 2005 she spent 3 months in a private artists residence in the small town of Vallauris on the Cote d’Azur.

A ceramics town Picasso returned there every year to make his pottery and it was indeed striking to find the community living surrounded by Art work in their daily lives (a large Picasso sculpture stood in the center of the every day vegetable market) Art was a part of living culture. This period spent painting everyday in these surrounds had a dramatic impact on her work. Exposed consistently to the work of Matisse, Miro, Braque, Picasso and Cezanne in tandem with working in a completely different light she embraced the difference in atmosphere and way of life. The work of Matisse and Cezanne in particular were then easy to understand- they painted the light and from their souls not from an intellectualized perspective The intensity and sensuous nature of the colour in the South gave rise to her current work which is in essence a hybrid of two contasting environments of France and New Zealand.

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