My name is Nicola, I am an artist and a writer interrogating the world through graphite drawings, prose, and satire.

I spent most of my childhood bent like a shrimp over my IKEA desk, painting alone in my bedroom. My teenage years were spent in foster care and institutions, and it was then that I began writing.

I heard and lived through stories that I felt deserved to be preserved, understood, and learned from. Today, I often reference mythology, pop culture, and religious parables to universalise them.

I work primarily in graphite. I like the hand feel of it: heavy and metallic, yet weightless in execution. It is a medium that doesn’t require compromise, giving me full control. Contrastingly the way its naturally reflective makes it feel liquid and alive.

Many of my compositions involve the subject “floating,” resembling the white-room scenes in The Matrix. Removing the context makes the context interchangeable, as if the scene could be in your living room or in your mind.

The opinions that become texts and drawings chafe in my periphery for a long time beforehand. Often, I write in persona, from the first-person perspective of a fictive character, an inanimate object, or an abstract concept; in this way I challenge philosophical and moral standpoints. Other times, my writing is more matter-of-fact, sociological, or confessional.

When words appear, they take priority as the most urgent and important thing. It is not unusual for me to drop my groceries in the street or to stand parked between aisles in the supermarket writing. When I finally, possibly years later, am able to articulate the idea accurately, I do not stop until it is finished. I have gone hours or days without leaving my chair, leading some people to mistakenly assume I abuse amphetamines.

The purpose of my art, as I see it, is to awaken curiosity in people. I want people to think and question; to look outward with curiosity at other people and inward with curiosity at themselves, without being so quick to moralise what they find.