I am happy to announce that I am participating in Earth Matters, the 2010 NCECA Invitational exhibition in Philadelphia. The show, installed at the Galleries at Moore, Moore College of Art and Design, opened on March 13 and runs until April 10, coinciding with the 44th annual NCECA conference, March 31 to April 3. I will be attending the conference and the opening of the 2010 NCECA Invitational, which takes place on April 1 at 7:00 p.m.

It is an honour to have been selected for this exhibition, curated by NCECA Exhibitions Director Linda Ganstrom. I am showing my porcelain piece, Devastatus Rememorari, for the fourth time, and once again had to source 400 lbs. of salt for the floor of the gallery. I would like to extend a special thank you to Robert Croker of Crozier Fine Arts for his unrelenting and successful search for glistening, white road salt in the middle of March in Philly. I am also grateful to Linda Ganstrom and her husband Sheldon for all their help during the installation that took place two weeks ago. Congratulations to Linda for putting together a beautiful show! Thank you for including me.

A full-colour catalogue for the 2010 NCECA Invitational exhibition will be available.

Photos by Gabrielle Lavin.

A couple of photos taken while installing work in Gallery in the Park, Altona. The show will be open on Friday, May 15.

By Elissa Barnard, Arts Reporter,
Halifax Chronicle Herald, May 22, 2008

Manitoba artist Grace Nickel was amazed when she took her first walk in Point Pleasant Park in August 2006.

“It was incredibly moving and powerful. It still surprises me every time, just the scale of the loss there.”

Nickel has created an elegant elegy to the devastation of Hurricane Juan in an installation of white porcelain trees encrusted in a bark of printed text, handwriting and woodsy textures. The eight trees stand as stumps, as tall figures with broken tops or as leaning pillars on a floor of rock salt that is shaped into a giant teardrop pattern. The lights at the Mary E. Black Gallery are dimmed to allow for reflection.

While this piece, called devastatus rememorari, is specifically inspired by the trees in Point Pleasant Park, it is more broadly about loss in nature and in human life, about remembering and rebuilding.

“There seem to be so many natural disasters and other types of destruction that are human-made,” says the recent NSCAD University graduate. “I didn’t imagine I’d live to see what I’ve seen and I’m constantly in need of memorializing events and people.

“I hope it extends beyond my personal need,” she says. “We need a place collectively to bring some of that grief and I hope for healing and recovering.”

To build the ceramic trees Nickel worked from three sections of one storm-wrecked tree that came from a friend’s cottage “from a friend who’d died so it was very meaningful,” says Nickel. (Point Pleasant Park officials don’t allow the removal of wood.)

Seven trees are variations on this one tree and the tallest is imprinted with newspaper stories published Sept. 30, 2003, after Hurricane Juan. One can read the headlines but not all of the print. “I want them to be about memory and the way memory can be somewhat fuzzy and faded,” says Nickel.

“One nice thing about the show is people tell me their stories. People who were here feel compelled to tell me.”

Nickel has also handwritten in looping patterns of slip clay the words devastated and the Latin devastatus and remembered and the Latin rememorari.

Text is very much a part of memorial monuments, says the artist and university instructor, who also refers to the history of monuments in her use of bronze glaze. “I find in Halifax there are a lot of commemorative monuments.”

Seven trees are skeletally white and the eighth has a dark, non-metallic bronze glaze. It leans in a fall towards the grouping of white trees. “I wanted it to stand apart. The idea is it is reaching out to the others. The others will be out of reach and that connects to memory or loss.

“When I was here I actually lost many people,” says Nickel.

She became fascinated by road salt, which is not used in Winnipeg, when she came to Halifax to study for her masters degree at NSCAD University. “In Halifax I saw this white residue on everything.”

When she started researching it, she realized the box of Sifto she’s always used comes from Nova Scotia, so she decided on glittering chunks of road salt, from both the Sifto mine in Amherst and a mine in Pugwash, as a base for her work.

The salt metaphorically links to the duality of recovery and destruction within the whole piece. “It’s been used as a preservative for many years. In terms of trees and the idea of rebuilding trees it would be devastation. Salt destroys.”

Raised in Winnipeg, Nickel has been photographing trees, often the ones damaged in flooding, for the last five years. She first made art about trees last summer when she made an uprooted tree for Winnipeg’s Subconscious City exhibit.

Nickel went to China last October with a group of 10 Canadian artists invited to create work for the permanent collection at the new Canadian Ceramics Museum, one of a series of 10 international ceramic museums being built on the site of the Fuping Pottery Art Village.

“You can’t bring any work with you and I decided to make a tree there. It started to evolve into a commemorative tree idea. There they often put petrified trees on pedestals with the text on them.”

Fuping is 70 miles from Xian City, famous for the terra cotta warriors and horses, and only 600 kilometres north of the site of last week’s devastating Chinese earthquake. “Apparently, of all the ceramics in the museum only five broke and three can be repaired,” says Nickel, who received an e-mail about the damage. “None of the Canadian pieces broke.”

Leaving Halifax soon to move back to Winnipeg, she says she is not done working with trees. “I don’t feel I’m finished. I’m going to teach this summer on Vancouver Island and I will go to Stanley Park because it’s also suffered a huge loss and I want to photograph the devastation there.”

Devastatus rememorari: Grace Nickel’s Memorial to Point Pleasant Park is at the Mary E. Black Gallery, Nova Scotia Centre for Craft and Design, 1061 Marginal Rd., right next to Pier 21, through Sunday. The gallery is open today, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m. [The exhibition concluded in May 2008.]

Devastatus Rememorari, 2008, dimensions 2 m × 3.5 m × 7.5 m, porcelain (with terra sigillata, oxide, and glaze), salt.

Text and photographs from the exhibition catalogue

Foreword – Susan MacAlpine Foshay, Director, Mary E. Black Gallery

Devastatus Rememorari – Sandra Alfoldy PhD

Artist’s Statement – Grace Nickel

Biography – Grace Nickel

View the entire tri-fold catalogue in PDF format (14.7 MB PDF file)

devastatus_rememorari_cat.pdf

Credits

©Mary E. Black Gallery

Photography: Steve Farmer

Text: Sandra Alfoldy, Grace Nickel, Susan MacAlpine Foshay

Design: Jackie Kelly

Sponsors

Elizabeth and Darrel Pink in honour of Anne Mullaly and Ruth Pink

NSCAD University

Manitoba Arts Council

Press

Elissa Barnard, “Seeing the forest for the trees: Nickel’s elegy of ceramics, salt, text, reflects on ruin of Juan, reconstruction,” in The Chronicle Herald, Thursday, May 22, 2008.

Devastatus Rememorari is dedicated to my dear friend Sheena Lennox 1965–2007. The spirit of her strength and courage will stay with me always. Grace Nickel.

Grace Nickel

In my current work I am investigating the concept of devastated trees, damaged through natural phenomena such as floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, or age, and also trees destroyed through human intervention. I have been collecting the remains of trees that have been broken, eroded, stripped of their bark, and cut. In my studio, these fragments have become metaphors for the inevitable process of decay and loss that occurs over time. Using porcelain, I am attempting to rebuild the trees by making casts of the demolished remnants. In my reclaimed ceramic trees, organic motifs and text are embedded in the trunks or applied to the surfaces of the segments that are being pieced together in a symbolic attempt to help mend the ravaged trees. The reconfigured ceramic forms embody traces of the trees’ history and stand as memorials to loss. At the same time, in my efforts to reconstruct them in clay, and by creating a new textual “bark” for the trees, I also acknowledge the potential for regeneration and recovery. The words devastated and remembered, and their Latin counterparts devastatus and rememorari are inscribed over and over again, imprinting a “texture of memory”¹ on the porcelain trees.

When I arrived in Halifax in 2006, I was profoundly moved by my first visit to Point Pleasant Park, and still, after numerous subsequent trips to the park, my awe at the magnitude of what took place there in September 2003 has not diminished. Point Pleasant Park provides stunning evidence of nature’s potential for destruction and its inherent power to heal itself. In my exhibition at the Mary E. Black Gallery, I pay tribute to this cherished urban retreat.

Grace Nickel is an award-winning ceramic artist, having been successful in the Mino Competition in Japan, the Golden Ceramics Awards in Taiwan, and the Fletcher Challenge Award in New Zealand. Nickel has been an Artist In Residence in Australia, Canada, China, and Taiwan and has attended three residency programs at the Banff Centre for the Arts. In 2002 she had a solo exhibition at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and was nominated by the WAG for the Saidye Bronfman award. In 2003 she was invited to participate in the International Large Outdoor Ceramic Lantern Workshop in Taiwan, and had work accepted into the First Taiwan Ceramic Biennale the following year. She was inducted into the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 2007. In the same year, she travelled to Xi’an, China as one of ten Canadian ceramic artists invited to create work for the permanent collection of the new Canadian Ceramics Museum, one of a series of international ceramic museums being built on the site of the Fuping Pottery Art Village. Her work appears in numerous other permanent and private collections including the National Museum of History in Taiwan, the Taipei County Yingge Ceramics Museum, the Claridge Collection in Montreal and the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Nickel completed her graduate studies at NSCAD University in Halifax in April 2008.

Susan MacAlpine Foshay
Director, Mary E. Black Gallery

We are extremely fortunate to show the work of Grace Nickel, an internationally respected Winnipeg ceramic artist, here in Halifax.

With sensitivity and perspective beyond many of us who were in Halifax at the time, Grace’s exhibition, Devastatus Rememorari, memorializes Point Pleasant Park in the wake of Hurricane Juan, a storm which hit our coast in September 2003. After moving to Halifax in 2006 to pursue her Master of Fine Arts at NSCAD University, Grace began this body of work. Devastatus Rememorari is deeply moving and stunningly beautiful work illuminating the devastation and offering solace and hope.

It is an honour and a pleasure to have worked with Grace and to host her exhibition. It is with profound sincerity that I thank Grace for her insights, wisdom and expertise and for the opportunity to show such meaningful work to our audience.

This publication documenting the installation has been made possible by the generous support of Elizabeth and Darrel Pink in honour of their mothers, Anne Mullaly and Ruth Pink.

Sandra Alfoldy PhD

Grace Nickel’s Devastatus Rememorari is deceptive. As you enter the hushed gallery space the installation invites you in through its quiet elegance. The abstracted tree shapes, arranged in a grouping that floats on its salty surface, are at first ephemeral. It is only as you come closer that you realize Nickel’s work is evoking collective ideas of devastatus rememorari, while simultaneously hitting the viewer with remnants and traces of individual memories of loss.

Devastatus Rememorari is a departure from Grace Nickel’s internationally respected work in architectural ceramic forms that reference the interplay between clay and light. This earlier body of work, described as “beautiful,” with an “element of the sinister,”¹ was largely composed of lamps rich with symbolic meaning. Awarded entry in to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA) in 2007 for this work, Nickel could have easily continued creating these “metaphorical lamps” that channeled her interest in the natural world. To her credit, Nickel took a leap of faith and departed from the safety of controlling elements from the natural world. The result is Devastatus Rememorari – a tribute to the awesome, random forces of nature and our human attempts to understand and control the resulting chaos.

While Nickel’s earlier ceramics implied a “dynamic between control and accident, order and randomness,”² this installation lets go of suggestions of restraint and instead pays tribute to the terrible pandemonium unleashed by natural elements. Tree forms were a natural transition for Nickel, with their powerful, elegant lines and similarity in scale to her standing lamps. Nickel has pushed herself to work taller than ever before, and the stacked clay casts made from moulds that compose these forms parallel the fragility and strength of trees. Slowly, Nickel has developed something akin to an obsession for the cultural treatment of trees.

Her studio has grown into a resource centre for the social life of trees, with black and white photographs of trees taken in Winnipeg, Halifax and China. Some of these trees are truly devastated, like the cracked and damaged trunk images she took after the Red River floods in Winnipeg, and most familiar to Haligonians, the shocking images of thousands of flattened trees in what was once the majestic forest of Point Pleasant Park. During her 2007 China residency in Xi’an, Nickel was fascinated with the care taken to wrap rope around trees to protect them against winter weather.³ Her tree photos focus on how they are presented and protected in urban cultural situations, while concurrently celebrating the resilience and growth symbolized by the tree. It is noteworthy that Nickel had difficulty finding a significant body of writing on the complex human relationship with trees: trees as memorials in and to nature; trees as reflections of human care and human neglect; trees as optimistic metaphors for growth.⁴ It seems we take trees for granted until we lose them. Nothing is more shocking than the sickening sound of an enormous tree being ripped by its roots during a hurricane or tornado. Nothing reminds you more of your own fragile scale in relation to the larger objects of nature.

The scale of Devastatus Rememorari lends itself to the gallery installation setting; while we are aware that these tree forms are not the largest, they are so real, so easily referenced, that we move beyond the form into a reading of the surface treatment. Not only has the subject matter of Nickel’s work undergone a radical transformation, she has dedicated the past two years to experimenting with language in her pieces, working toward the subtle conveyance of meaning from what started as a more literal relationship to text.

Whereas Nickel’s earlier ceramic art employed ornament to both entice and disturb through its flora and fauna references, Devastatus Rememorari builds upon this by adding textual elements. Her first attempts were laborious, and depended on the complex writing out of the words “Devastatus Rememorari” in slip. Worried that this approach would be dismissed as too decorative, Nickel moved on to create a variety of textual surfaces, ranging from incised carving and applied words to photo transfers. The result is surfaces on the tree forms that are built of text that has been layered, abstracted and made almost impossible to read. This process of literally working through the terms for devastation and memory is analogous to the repetitive movements that can comfort during the grieving process. Nickel’s physical movements through these words, the ideas they embody, and the ornamented abstracted surfaces that result, bring individual mourning and loss into the collective sphere.

Devastatus Rememorari has been designed to reflect the idea of devastation in relation to tree forms. Installed in a teardrop shape, all the trees in the exhibition lean along the same path as if holding on with all their might. In the aftermath of Hurricane Juan one of the most compelling sights was that of the blown down trees, all felled in the same direction. Analogies to Hurricane Juan in this exhibition are no accident. Beyond reminding the viewer of the physiological realities of mourning, the teardrop shape reflects the pattern of hurricane activity. The trees are grouped together, standing in a bed of salt that is reminiscent of tears, and the dry, parched space where nothing grows. The salt also serves as a reminder of the ocean sprays that battered Point Pleasant Park during Hurricane Juan.

Grace Nickel is an expert at ornamentation, and in Devastatus Rememorari she balances the surface statements on her tree forms with the larger collective message of the exhibition. Read from a distance the solemn grouping of trees is unified; up close, the individuality of each tree form is distinct. The subdued colour palette composed mainly of white, black, bronze and earthy greens encourages reflection and quiet memories. Bronze symbolizes something beyond the tree – a reminder of the precious objects of worship and sacred ceremonies. But bronze also operates as a metaphor for the sacred nature of trees, and their central role in helping us understand natural tragedies. It is no surprise that thousands of mourners made the pilgrimage to Point Pleasant Park after the hurricane, to gaze through their tears at the unbelievable number of magnificent trees scattered across the ground. Bronze reminds us of the memorials and tributes we pay to those who have fallen, and to the small plaques we love to place at the base of trees in our hopes that nature’s shrines will live on forever.

Hello everyone,

If you’re wondering what I’ve been “up” to in Halifax lately, here’s a recent studio shot for you to look at. My MFA exhibition at the Mary E. Black Gallery will be up exactly three weeks from today on April 11, with the opening reception taking place on April 17 at 6:00 p.m.

Wishing you all the best, Grace