Intended Audience
Artist Talk: Wednesday, October 9, 4:45-5:45 p.m., Glendening Annex
“Weaving is hand work and is digital. Digital came from digits, from counting on our fingers. Now digital means information that is delivered via computer program-- an array of ones and zeros arranged in grids.
Grids are the overlay to interface with everything. Cities are planned on a grid, icons snap to a grid, a grid overlays an image to edit. When Clare was a teenager, she would draw in MS Paint pixel by pixel, placing each tiny square of color with the most precision the mouse would allow. That same digital grid is how she decides how to build shapes on the warp.
Weaving is also the marriage of image and object, building fabric from scratch. The revelation between empty warp and finished cloth feels mythic: at first there was nothing, and now here is something. Weaving tells stories, textiles are connected to text. The rhythm of shape and color in her tapestries is a poem. A line of color running up the side is marginalia. The knots that finish the cut ends are a signature. Clare dyes her own yarn to brew her own vocabulary; she salvages yarn from thrift stores and by unraveling sweaters to reclaim words that have been lost to her.
The weaving process has a sense of unearthing what is lost, sometimes. Language shifts, myths are retold. Artist Rowland Ricketts once said, “Sitting at the loom connects you to the origin of things.” Through weaving it is possible to re-trace those origins and find new paths beyond the present.” - Clare Nicholls
Biography
Clare Nicholls is an artist and educator living and working in Baltimore, Maryland. Clare is a weaver and artist who loves touching soft things and is obsessed about knowing everything. Formerly the manager of The Shed, an exhibit makerspace within the Maryland Science Center, she wrote programming and taught workshops focused on STEAM education in informal contexts. Clare also teaches weaving workshops for the public around Baltimore, MD. Her professional goal is to connect people to process.
Clare earned a BA in Art and Art History from St. Mary’s College of Maryland in 2010, and obtained a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2013. She most recently showed work in RITUALISMS at the Target Gallery in Alexandria, VA in January 2019. She has also shown work at the School of Design Gallery at Stevenson University, Boyden Gallery at St. Mary's College, and the Riggs and Leidy Galleries at MICA. Clare also lectured on how weaving structures have influenced garments throughout history at the School of Design at Stevenson University.