Nicki is an artist and maker working predominantly in ceramic and textiles. With a background in heritage and arts development, for the last ten years she has combined her personal practice with a core role at Oxcombe Pottery, where her studio is also based. Nicki also has a twenty-year track record in creating and delivering transformative community arts experiences, both individually and in partnership.
In her artwork, themes of resilience, rurality and tradition underpin an exploration of pattern-making and repetition, creating quiet artefacts that reflect aspects of the Lincolnshire landscape and frugal domesticity. Often working in series and multiples, Nicki produces objects which reference traditional techniques but tell new stories. The work itself is often constructed through repetition of shape and form. Either as textiles which utilise constructional quilt-making or ceramic objects that form dynamic assemblages.
Recent ceramic work explores the possibilities of handbuilt cubes, inspired by the first principles of quilt construction, with thinly pinched walls creating objects which appear solid but are fragile and light. The gently curving forms invite handling, and as many of them contain ceramic beads, their unexpected rattle is a sensory surprise.
Artist-in-Residence, Mrs Smith’s Cottage Museum
Mrs Smith’s Cottage is an 1830’s agricultural labourer’s cottage in Navenby, Lincolnshire. North Kesteven District Council commissioned Nicki as artist-in-residence as part of a National Lottery Heritage Funded renovation and reinterpretation initiative. Originally appointed for two years in mid-2019, the residency was extended for a further two years, supported by additional NHLF funding and Nicki’s successful application for an Arts Council England Project Grant.
The core brief was to create site-inspired artworks and find ways of engaging with members of the local community, to reconnect them with a heritage property that had been closed for a number of years. Nicki liaised with the interpretation team Grevatte & Co to make pieces which provided subtle interpretation in this living history setting, often using extracts from Mrs Smith’s extensive daily diaries. Texts were stitched into objects including replica clothing and a hand-embroidered cushion, and stencilled onto handmade ceramic pavers inserted into the garden path.
Larger-scale community projects included the Community Rug and Friendship Chair, which involved many local people contributing their handskills. These projects suited pandemic conditions since they were provided in pack form and then constructed by Nicki. The Friendship Chair patchwork was created in collaboration with Hannah & Nails, and covers a donated mid-century armchair, with digitally-printed fabric inspired by wallpaper fragments from the cottage, embroidered names from Mrs Smith’s Diary and decorative additions by Sleaford Embroiderers group.
Nicki was invited to create a Navenby Heritage Trail booklet to complement the district’s Ridges & Furrows trail series. The fifteen ceramic Navenby Datestones were conceived as way markers for the trail, conveying village history from the Iron Age onwards. This ambitious project required liaison with Lincolnshire County Council Highways as well as District and Parish Councils. A series of community workshops involved people aged 5-92 in contributing to a ceramic tile panel installed on an external wall of the community centre. The Navenby Map Rug was created in conjunction with the Trail, using Mrs Smith’s favourite rug-hooking technique to replicate the OS Map c1906.
Curious Keepsake Machine (group-led Arts Council England-funded project)
As a co-ordinator member of the Lincolnshire Design-Nation group, Nicki worked with seven other artists during the COVID-19 pandemic to create an interactive artwork designed to engage visitors in gallery spaces post-lockdown. With the funding, development and design stages undertaken entirely remotely and online over months, the project re-purposed a 1950s cigarette dispensing machine to deliver tiny artworks in handmade boxes, offering an accessible way for people to own art as well as raising the profile of the participating makers post-pandemic. The CKM toured to three Lincolnshire venues: The Hub, Sleaford, The Collection, Lincoln and 20-21 Gallery, Scunthorpe, providing an added attraction for visitors. The popularity of the project meant that artwork production doubled, and hundreds of keepsakes are now owned by people who returned to galleries in the early months after lockdown.
PLACE (self-initiated Arts Council England-funded project)
Newly-settled in the Riverhead area of Louth in 2012, Nicki developed an interactive exhibition project that invited local people to reflect on the place in which they lived. The Louth Navigation (canal) enabled the creation of a thriving commercial centre in the late 1700s and Nicki was interested to both promote this heritage and explore contemporary perspectives.
Transforming her terraced house into a workspace, Nicki created largescale screen-printed and embroidered fabric patchwork maps (using contemporary OS mapping data) to act as inspirational place-markers. In a series of workshops and then a week-long exhibition based at the historic Navigation Warehouse, she involved local people in adding their personal reflections to the maps and stitching embroidered name labels, both their own names and those from Victorian census returns. The project inspired significant participation and press interest, with overseas contributors, surprise reconnections and people making return visits with friends and family.
Oxcombe (Tutor and Technical Manager, part-time)
Oxcombe is a creative ceramic and art education space based in converted Victorian barns on an historic manorial farming settlement in the Lincolnshire Wolds. Nicki has taught at Oxcombe Pottery since it started in 2014, and now combines a management and development role with teaching, with her studio also on-site.
Over the past ten years, Nicki has worked with hundreds of Oxcombe members developing their skills and supporting professional development. Oxcombe now holds a series of annual exhibiting events, with experienced members now selling their work here and at galleries and venues elsewhere in the region.
The venue attracts regular attendance (sometimes over many years) from people across the county, offering extensive resources and skills-development in a tranquil rural setting. Continued investment and development at Oxcombe enables aspiring potters and ceramicists to attend one-day events, intensive courses and regular atelier-style classes, with numerous small creative businesses (and micro-pottery studios) being developed as a result.