Between the Tides

Barbara Nicholls’ (b. 1963, UK) work echoes a deep-rooted fascination with nature and its elements. She employs the traditional medium of watercolour, uniquely pushing its boundaries. In her studio, a space that functions as both a laboratory and a site of discovery, she lays sheets of paper on the floor, covers parts or the entirety of the surface with water, and then adds pigments to the moisturised areas. The liquified colour spreads, flows and transforms into small pools and streams emulating landscape formations, water edges, mineral deposits or other textures caused by chemical reactions. While drawing, she reflects on natural formations encountered or imagined: tide mark lines on beaches, creeping glaciers and moraine deposits, cliffs and quarries with their shifting forms of geological strata revealing traces of past events and the slow movements of the earth. Similar to the ever-changing patterns of our earth, Nicholls’ procedure can take hours or even days and be repeated over and over for a single work, evoking the intricacies and complexity of geological strata.