Nicole Bricker

Lives and works in Baltimore, MD, USA

Artist statement

I create art across sculpture, painting, cyanotypes, printmaking, and installation, layering materials and processes to reflect the histories carried by the objects themselves. Writing is the foundation of my practice. Notes, observations, and longer reflections help me untangle ideas before they become visual. Rather than working within a single medium, I let each question determine its own form. My artwork begins with inherited domestic objects. Family keepsakes, photographs, and decorative objects become a way of examining how everyday things shape us long after they have outlived their original purpose. I am interested in the lives objects have after they stop being useful and how they transform into carriers of memory, labor, care, and identity across generations. By placing inherited objects into new relationships, I think about how their meanings shift over time. A doily protected furniture. A serving dish gathered families around a table. A ceramic figurine decorated a shelf. I alter, combine, repeat, and reposition these familiar forms, disrupting their original functions while allowing their histories to remain visible. They become evidence of touch, repetition, and care, carrying traces of the hands that made them and the lives that surrounded them. This work also makes me consider what we are leaving behind now. As more of our memories, relationships, and histories move into digital spaces, I find myself wondering what will become the heirlooms of our own...

Artwork