Rose Nicholas

Rose Nicholas (b.1993) is a multi-disciplinary artist from Bristol. She moved to London to study for her BA in Fine Art Painting at Wimbledon College of Art, UAL. Whilst there she got shortlisted for the Art Retreat Prize and did the Feral Space Residency at Kinsley Hall in London.

After leaving university she gained a studio at Block 336 Gallery where she also participated in the gallery’s running. She’s exhibited in group shows including Prop Me Up, Bankley Gallery, Manchester (2018); Eat Fresh. Start with your Neighbours, Art Lacuna, London (2019), Service, Stow Building, Glasgow (2021) and HFBK x GSA, Institute for Contemporary Art & Transfer, HFBK, Hamburg (2023). She recently received the Niamh Forbes Postgraduate Fine Art Scholarship.

Suggestive anthropomorphisms, uncontrollable motion, and surreal domesticity lie at the core of Rose Nicholas’s practice. Working with found quotidian objects, she extracts them from their natural habitat and introduces them to a new environment, testing their functionality.

The Everyday plays a major role throughout her practice as she estranges the familiar, causing one to reflect on what underlies the mundane. Ceaseless cycles and continual leaks are recurrent motifs throughout her work. She highlights the unstoppable and ever-changing facets of life that elude our attempts at control. The work has a humorous and melancholic tone as it ostensibly presents as something of importance, but on closer inspection, it is seemingly futile, leaving a sense of paradox.