Nicole Espy
nicole.espy@gmail.com
Biography
I am an amateur printmaker from Atlanta, GA and currently residing in Seattle, WA. In my younger years, I focused mostly on painting with acrylics with a focus on color and figures. I took classes in Basic Drawing and Painting during undergrad at Yale College. During this time I also studied British art history in London and was a gallery guide for the Yale Center for British Art leading tours focusing on landscape art from Claude to J.M.W. Turner. I took a 10 year pause to focus on my career as a virologist. When arriving in Seattle in 2018, I hoped to renew my artistic interests by taking Beginner Silkscreen and Beginner Printmaking at the Pratt Fine Arts Center. I began silkscreen printing at home and taught a silkscreen class at The Works Seattle, a DIY school for adults. I am surviving the pandemic by creating linocut postcard prints and mailing them to my friends across the country.
Artist Statement
My artistic interests are in understanding the way figure and landscape are rendered by different medias. My early paintings were portraits using acrylics and I focused on using interesting color or forms. During my hiatus for art, I deepened my childhood interest in collage and storytelling in art, such as the works form Carrie Mae Weems, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Diego Rivera, and Gordon Parks. Printmaking seemed like a great means to help me make denser, more meaningful images than I could previously achieve in painting. I currently try to make landscapes that have been simplified in various ways, but made more complex by color. I also aim to make portraits that are flattened so that the figure is more of an object of complex shape. I hope to bring this all together in a narrative series, as a zine or comic, using risoprint.
Statement of Intent
In the past few years I’ve been experimenting with silkscreen and linocut at home, and enjoying the limitations that limited resources can supply. Access to space and mentorship at Editions would improve the quality of my work and allow me the tools to do more complex methods at a larger scale and volume. I would like to build off my previous work and prototype risoprint zine and make a narrative semi-autobiographical series using mixed print methods. The message my work hopes to convey is the existence of an individuality and inner life of black women like myself. Inspired by Carrie Mae Weems and the writer N.K. Jemisen, I want to create printed short stories about something small and personal (portraits/figures) but have them feel epic (landscape/color). I hope this Residency will allow me to create the works that demonstrate my artistic vision.
