ARTIST STATEMENT
Anchored in a deep connection to the landscape and fascination with the photo-based object, my work investigates how observing Nature informs contemplation, perception, and identity. My process involves daily walks to connect with the landscape. I distill the gleaned information into sketches which I then translate into photographic image-objects in the darkroom using light, wet plate collodion chemistry, paper cut-outs, cliché verre, and brushes. The experimental camera-less compositions created through multiple exposures allude to landscapes, light and atmospheric phenomena, and organic forms found in nature. Rather than transcribing the observed landscape, I seek to record intuitive responses that speak to the felt and ineffable experiences of being fully present in the landscape: to a sense of wonder, awe, and permeating immanence, while simultaneously meditating on loss, hope, and meaning.
Straddling the line between representation and abstraction, the pared down visual vocabulary arises from the immediacy of the photogram as I explore the boundaries of the photographic medium, placing it in conversation with painting, collage, graphic arts, and sculpture. The compositions, ranging in mood from contemplative stillness to dynamism and movement, employ shape, artifact, gesture, and tonal range to explore balance and rhythm.
ELEMENTAL FORMS: LANDSCAPE
Elemental Forms: Landscape emerged a direct response to my surroundings and to experiencing a sense of well-being and security within the landscape. My aim with this series is to record intangible aspects of the landscape as I experience them through immersion and observation during my daily walks. Employing sparse tools: cut paper, light, and chemistry, I reduce the composition to its essentials, referencing the imprint of the place while simultaneously attempting to dissolve geographic and temporal coordinates.
ELEMENTAL FORMS: LANDSCAPE REARTICULATED
Elemental Forms: Landscapes Rearticulated investigates the potential for generating new meaning when the observed manifestation or phenomenon is reconceived as an idea. For example, we think of the landscape as solid but when observed through the lens of geologic time, the landscape is in continual permutation. Further, when we view the landscape through the lens of physics, its building blocks appear as waves in perpetual motion, or energy in vibration. Therefore, the solidity and permanence of the landscape can be thought of as an idea, and ideas are malleable. By deconstructing the landscape and rearranging the sinuous, organic lines into new compositions, I invite the viewer to form new associations and to envision and claim different possibilities.
BIO
Born in 1978 (Novi Sad, former Yugoslavia), Nadezda Nikolova is a photographic artist. Her work is in the permanent collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles, USA), Victoria & Albert Museum (London, UK), SAMoCA Saudi Arabia Museum of Contemporary Art (Riyadh, SA), Monterey Museum of Art (Monterey, California), and Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University (Bloomington, Indiana), has been featured in The Washington Post, British Journal of Photography, The Architectural Review, and Black & White Photography Magazine, among others, and is exhibited and collected internationally. In 2023, Nazraeli Press published her monograph entitled Elemental Forms. She has lectured about her work at various universities and photographic institutions, including SUNY Plattsburgh (New York), Penumbra Foundation (New York), Center for Photographic Art (California), and Santa Fe Workshops (Arizona). Nadezda is represented by HackelBury Fine Art in London and Esther Woerdehoff Gallery in Paris.