Nell is an artist at play. Paradoxical and engaging, she has a diverse practice fuelled by sincere questioning of the paradigms that make up the world around her. The result is a curious culmination of influences that hold meaning for Nell – from Zen Buddhism to AC/DC and Japanese religious iconography to name a few. Ahead of her first major survey exhibition at the Shepparton Art Museum, Nell spoke with Art Almanac about finding the ‘in-between’.
In your practice you reconstitute everyday objects for different purposes. What does this life cycle of reinvention mean for you – is it spiritually informed?
I use everything available to me materially, spiritually, physically or mentally. Whatever it is I try to stay open to all its possibilities. It was important for me that The Wake (2014-2016) was made of a combination of materials I’d transformed through my own hand-making with natural materials like pearls, branches and feathers with the aged character of the stools. As an artist, all I really do is channel the inherent histories and magic of materials into objects that give my life meaning. And I figure if it means something to me then there is a chance it might be meaningful to others too.
There is a dark violence that echoes in The Wake – the orifices on the forms are crudely cut, or punctured. What attracts you to create forms that blend paradoxes of light and dark, humour and violence?
My experience of life is that it is pretty fragile, and brutal, and mysterious. We have all these holes in our bodies where stuff is going in or going out – we are very porous, very leaky and very temporary. A lot of my work uses binary opposites that we easily recognise, like black/white, night/day, male/female, quiet/loud, and contained/uncontained. I use them to show that their absoluteness is bullshit. While they seem like opposites they are, like us, just a stream of relativity, change and impermanence. Everything is ‘in-between’ and that is where
the gold is for me. Also, I’m a mega fan of Lucio Fontana’s egg-shaped series called Le Fine de Dio (The end of God), 1963/64. They are simultaneously a painting and a sculpture, violent and serene, kitsch and magnificent and that all turns me on!
What informed your use of the stools?
It was a happy studio accident. And a perfect solution for a ‘plinth’ for this body of work as the legs on the stools give the spirit creatures more personality and anthropomorphism. I had inherited a stool that I used in the studio from Lindy Lee and it was pretty beaten up and paint splattered when she gave it to me nearly 20 years ago. I had made one of the ceramic works on this stool and after the work was fired I just put it back on the stool – they belonged together.
How did your single-name ‘Nell’ come about? Was it inspired by hip-hop?
It had nothing to do with hip-hop or with being cool. I was christened Nell and I lost my last name in an unexpected confluence of happenstance where everyone at art school just knew me as Nell, and a severing of family karma. Having just one name can be really annoying for paper work and computer systems. However, having no last name is like having everyone’s last name, like being part of everyone’s family and I like that feeling very much.
Shepparton Art Museum (SAM)
8 October to 27 November, 2016
Victoria
The Wake, 2014–2016, mixed media, variable dimensions, installation: ‘Magic Object, The 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art’, The Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Photograph: Saul Steed
