Interview: Nicole Collins

Artist: Nicole Collins
Exhibit Name: The Reconstruction
Gallery: General Hardware Contemporary
Dates: November 17, 2011 – January 21, 2012
Interviewed by: Michael Hansen
Aired on ArtSync: 2 January 2011

“One of the reasons I love wax so much is because of the powerful contradiction between its fragility…and its resilience.”

With her new exhibit, The Reconstruction, Toronto-based artist Nicole Collins continues to explore the artistic possibilites of wax, a material with which she has had a twenty-year relationship. Collins’ most recent work has been increasingly focused on the process of wax-based painting. Older paintings are broken down and reassembled in new configurations so that the viewer is able to observe both the process and the finished product of the piece.

The process is crucial to Collins’ work, as she uses innovative and labour-intensive techniques to stretch wax’s potential. Moving away from the smooth, gestural wax work of her earlier career, Collins now employs a more sculptural approach. Wax is mixed with such additives as dried paint (to create texture) and burlap (handwoven to create the painting’s desired scale).

While her sensibilities are decidely modern, wax has had a long artistic history. As Collins mentions in our interview, wax was famously used in the creation of Egyptian sarcophagi and in the mummification process itself. In therms of paintings, the artists of ancient Rome, Greece, and Egypt mixing beeswax and Damar resin with coloured pigments to ensure vibrancy and longevity. Collins follows this same ancient technique, observing how “wax is the binder, holding the pigment in place.”

See more of Nicole Collins’ work at the General Hardware Contemporary’s website.

-KF