Fay Nicolson

About

I am an artist working across painting and performance, playing with the ways these processes and disciplines overlap. I draw from histories of expanded painting, radical pedagogy, experimental music and theatre. I aim to nurture unexplored connections across historical contexts and think about the tensions that arise between action and image, experience and documentation.

Bodies of work include: Vessels to Bring to the Bacchanal, a painting series departing from the Ancient Greek play by Euripides (2021-ongoing); SPA SONGS, a polyphonic song cycle responding to the river Thames and Bermondsey's history (2018); OVER AND OVER PURE FORM, a long-form poem set to music satirising the curriculum of a fantasy art school (2016); We Exist! We Have the Will! We are Producing!, visual works exploring the status of gender and craft within the Bauhaus and Modernist art education (2011).

I have a BA in Fine Art from CSM (2006), a PGCE in Art Education from the IoE (2008) and an MA in Printmaking from the RCA (2011). I began teaching in 2008, primarily working in galleries such as the Chisenhale, Gasworks and the Camden Arts Centre to deliver education and outreach programmes. I have lectured internationally; including teaching at the Dutch Art Institute (2010-12), Gerrit Rietveld Academie (2012); Vienna University of Applied Arts (2013); Grafikskolan and The Royal Institute of Art, Sweden (2017). In the UK I have taught widely across UAL (2008-2022), University of Brighton (2015-2017) and Norwich University of the Arts (2014-2022).

Education, its histories and potential futures, and how it channels ideologies and aesthetics, is an ongoing preoccupation of my work.