Statement

Throughout her artistic practice Nicola Lane has used a variety of media to explore themes of fragmentation and loss and their effect on self-image, informed by her experience of disability and by the cultural fragmentation of a peripatetic childhood.

 
In Monuments to Incompleteness (1999) funded by the Bader Foundation, she used the craft processes of prosthetics such as mould making and cast plaster to create a series memorialising her experience of limb loss. In Adorn,Equip (2000, ACE) an exhibitionexamining the aesthetics of disability equipment,  she worked with archive photographs selected  from the Science Museum’s collection, digitally cutting and fragmenting the images to  create Beautiful Pictures, her installation for the exhibition. In her 2006 film SPLITSCREEN ( ACE) she explored the representation of disability in film through the cutting and juxtaposition of 2 films from 2 cultures.

Over the last 7 years a variety of residencies and projects in hospitals, schools and galleries developed her interest in the creative potential of collaborative practice, enabling new narratives and perspectives in her work. In her 2007 film Give Me My Robe, Put On My Crown, (Paul Hamlyn Foundation / Camden Arts&Tourism), she worked in collaboration with women ex-offenders to explore the transforming effect of live performance on self-image and identity.

In 2008 Nicola was invited to participate in Culture Coup, a public art installation by 3 international artists in Aristotle Square for the City’s annual Dimitria Festival. Through the use of a fragmented and enlarged 1919 family group photograph from Thessaloniki’s Museum of Photography archives, she created an interactive installation designed to engage the public in the City’s history of ‘population exchanges’, further developing the cutting and dispersal of found images used in her2004 exhibition A Slice of Ireland  ( Kingsgate Workshops Trust residency with Kilburn Irish Pensioners Group) and in Adorn,Equip.

Throughout 2008 her interest in collaborative practice developed through co-founding with artist Matthew Stone The Art Salon, a group of artists, writers and performers whose weekly meetings created a collective with the potential for new and exciting creative ventures; including events at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Royal Academy’s GSK Contemporary. In 2008 creative collaborations arising from the Salon resulted in Sheltered Housing, a short film exploring the life of iconic blind performer Jack Birkett, founder member of the Lindsay Kemp Company and star of Derek Jarman’s The Tempest, Jubilee, and others. Sheltered Housingwill be screened in December 2010, as part of a nationwide programme of films by disabled filmmakers. The Art Salon recently participated in The Great British Art Debate at Tate Britain and in Recessional Aesthetics at the James Taylor Gallery.

In October 2009 Clean Break commissioned Nicola for Speaking From The Heart, a film documenting a group of graduates from Clean Break’s Access course devising their response to It felt Empty When The Heart Went At First But it’s Alright Now, Clean Break’s production at the Arcola Theatre by award winning playwright Lucy Kirkwood. Funded by the BIS ‘Transformation’ fund, Speaking From The Heart was filmed at the Arcola Theatre in surreal promenade sets as a background to the narrative drama of transforming personal experience into art.

Participation in education projects include SHAPE’s Link Up programme and most recently mentoring for Kingsgate Workshop Trust’s Emerging Artists programme, funded by Arts Council England.  Nicola’s work is in private collections in the USA and the UK, and has also been acquired by the Imperial War Museum’s Collection of Contemporary Art and the archive of London Metropolitan University’s Irish Studies Department.



Web links:
http://www.nicolalane.blogspot.com (documentation of Thessalonica project)
www.adornequip.co.uk