Order and Unknowing: Paintings by Nicole Collins

Exhibition Essay by Mona Filip

Order and Unknowing
12 Degrees, 2023


Although intrinsic to human existence, withstanding the unknown might be our most difficult task. Through ritual we hope to tame the chaos, through science to elucidate the universe, and through imagination to make sense of life. We order and explain to better cope with loss, mortality and everything beyond our control. Nevertheless, to thrive we need to find balance between order and chaos, to nurture light yet equally embrace darkness as our own. We walk the tightrope between gravity and grace.
 

In her artistic practice, Nicole Collins claims darkness and cultivates it with the kind of care that knows how to set free. Venturing to paint the heaviness, she mines it deep enough to reach the other side of light. Her process of making, unmaking and remaking echoes the very act of living. She risks and risks again, pressing her instincts to relinquish the ordering impulse and let the mystery be.

With Agamemnon’s Dream and Clytemnestra’s Dream (2010) Collins gestures to Greek tragedy, where some of Western culture’s archetypes of human passion and folly were forged. Accumulations of flesh-like red and charcoal black encaustic overlaid on canvas articulate landscapes of turmoil. Long and narrowly composed, Agamemnon’s Dream references a moment of hubris. The tangled surfaces invoke the crimson carpet of precious fabrics welcoming Agamemnon upon his triumphant return from the sacking of Troy. Dark premonitions make him falter yet the king proceeds, walking to his death. The wronged queen and bereaved mother of a daughter sacrificed for the success of war enacts her revenge. Clytemnestra’s Dream, a smaller, darker composition, shimmers with blood-red flashes under viscous black masses like molten lava, evoking tectonic shifts of violent emotions.

In The Fisherman’s Dark Daughter (2017), the poignant weight of intensely laboured black encaustic offers more space for contemplation. Collins first builds the painting using wax, pigment and a recurrent textural material – the fishing net. Then ripped away, the net leaves a scarred ground in its wake. Symbolic of catch and release, of presence and absence, the fishnet generates an open-ended tension. “Some girls are blessed with a dark turn of mind,” sings Gillian Welch, and those touched by melancholy recognize themselves in the lyric.

Order and Unknowing and Gravity and Grace (after SW) (2022) are created in their own unmaking. Having first built the paintings’ rough surfaces through successive additive and subtractive methods, Collins then undoes it all by stripping and melting the very matter of the work. A wounded palimpsest emerges, mapping a fertile process of perpetual becoming.

Driven by a yearning to repair, Collins’s visceral paintings push against the physical limitations of materials scraped, cut, torn and removed, coming to terms with the impossibility of recovery. Fissures, rips and ghostly remains create permeable layers held together by memory as much as mending, materializing portent absences. In her most recent works, Collins yields fearlessly to destruction and loss, intuiting the promise of freedom in release. This surrender delivers boundless new potential unburdened by control or premeditation, guided instead by true receptiveness.