Artist busy with ideas fit for print

Nicol Sanders-O'Shea's work Home Cloud, on show in the new exhibition Printmaking: Beyond the Frame, at the Tauranga Art Gallery. Photo/Dan Du Bern

SINCE winning the Supreme Awards in the Waikato Society of Arts New Zealand Painting and Printmaking in February, it's been a busy year for local artist Nicol Sanders-O'Shea.

Besides working full time as a tutor and programme co-ordinator for the Bachelor of Creative Industries at Bay of Plenty Polytechnic, Nicol has been invited to exhibit in shows at art galleries across the country.

"I get invited to exhibit and exhibitions come up all the time that I submit a proposed work for, and I am planning a solo show in August 2016 at Solander Gallery in Wellington," she says.

"I would like to get a residency in the near future, the idea of just making artwork for a consolidated period of time and not having any other responsibilities, seems too good to be true."

Nicol's work, alongside that of more than 20 other artists, features in the new exhibition Printmaking: Beyond the Frame at the Tauranga Art Gallery. She says she enjoys the multiple nature of the printmaking process, "that you can do more than one".

"When I teach students printmaking I always encourage them to print as many as possible to sell or give away," she says.

The process Nicol loves the most is screen-printing and she says this means you have to love water, too, as there is lots of washing up and getting wet.

For her artwork Home Cloud, part of the exhibition on show at the Tauranga Art Gallery, she screen-printed part of the work straight on to the gallery wall.

"I can screen-print on to most surfaces ... I still find it enjoyable and discover new approaches." Home Cloud is a group of 30 works presented within a printed cloud formation to represent the concept of data storage and the contextual framing of memory and story telling.

"The original work that was shown at the Gus Fisher was a group of 15 works, but for this show I asked to increase the work to 30 as I was not satisfied with the scale and complexity of my idea," the artist says.

"I want the viewer to enjoy the works overall decorative quality, it is almost wallpaper-like, and to have an intermit discovery to uncover what each individual work might be about.

"I am interested in personal storytelling and ideas of childhood and adulthood, where memory and experience crossover and merge, even morph."

Printmaking: Beyond the Frame is an exhibition of members of the Central Print Council Aotearoa New Zealand (CPCANZ) and three guests, Kate McLean, Alexis Neal and corrugated iron-man Jeff Thomson.

"Even though I have been exhibiting print work for 23 years, I only just joined the collective last year," Nicol says. "I had heard they were going to show at the Gus Gallery in Auckland, so I joined and submitted Home Cloud. Since then I have been in a print exchange show in Australia and a show in Palmerston North."