mixed media Collage
Artist
Lucy Nicholls
2025
Perhaps more of a method than a medium! I love combining mixed media through collage to create interesting and symbolic compositions. I have used the technique to create pieces out of children’s (including my own daughter’s) artwork. I also enjoy combing mixed media that expresses diverse forms such as music, pop culture, children’s tales, and more.
childhood
This series of pieces was my first attempt at taking craft and sketches from my daughter and integrating them into a harmonious collage that I could display in the dining room area of our home. Inspired by the beauty and volume of craft that my daughter was creating both at home and at nursery school I decided that I had to do something more with it than store it or throw the excess away. I also wanted to create pieces that I could pass onto her in future. It is my sense that we should do more to honor the exploratory approach of all children to their learning and unrestrained expression at this beautiful and short phase of life. From this, I began to evolve a larger body of work “Longhaul Life”.
2025
mediums
Completed at Jenne M Curie’s Woodstock School of Art Mixed Media Collage studio series, this piece makes use of a variety of inputs from trimmings of coloring book pictures from Disney that my daughter painted on, to paper cut outs of loose lines painted by Jenne, to sheets of music and text from a magazine printed in Mandarin (I reserve the right to be wrong on that). It was a wonderful way to relax and express myself during what was a time of intense burnout recovery. These compositions were great foundational practice for developing “Longhaul Life”.
2025
Show me
Similar to the piece above this work was completed at Woodstock School of Art as as a vehicle for active rest. This piece explores childhood expression and the duality we relay onto children from an early age in the form of fairy tales. We label good and bad, hero and villain in these stories and create a binary framework in the consciousness of the young very early in life. I reflect on these tales as I share them with my daughter and how the experiences of adulthood eventually reveal to you that this duality is often no reality. The supposed hero or villain in any situation can be a matter of perspective from position. And when we do label a villain what really underlies the shadow that has been cast upon such a character and given different life experiences, how might they behave otherwise? Given a different orientation of our own position, how might we see them otherwise?
In creating this piece I further reflected on a time in my postpartum life when I became so acutely aware of something being off tilt. It was the constraints placed around female expression and experience relative to the default and how those undermine women’s health. I first noticed through an embodied experience—feelings of intense anger yet without being able to consciously explain it. After sitting in this state with intention and exploring it, eventually I was able to express it, imperfectly through language. One of the great external triggers of this raised awareness were song lyrics, symbol appropriations, and the deconstruction of language and how we label things based on limited observation and cultural pre-conditioning. It felt like being reunited with my soul.
2025
Bluescape
A simple collage making use of acrylic strips of loose painted blue strokes that I completed on sketch paper along with tissue paper blotted with orange acrylic paint and some strips of black tissue and textured cardboard. This piece experiments with texture, translucency and composition. It was perhaps inspired by the view one sees from an aircraft looking down and it reminds me of an abstract version of the views seen over the midwest of the U.S. flying into Denver, Colorado.
2025
