Latest Shape collaboration: Exhibiting artist for ‘In Out There’ - the 10th ARMB Shortlist exhibition -, and a participating artist in the Shape Open 2017

Artist Statement: Since graduating from art school in 1972, Nicola Lane’s artistic practice evolved from painting into sculpture, installation and filmmaking. Cutting and fragmenting is a recurring process, informed by her experience of disability and peripatetic childhood.

In 1999 Disability Arts activism and ‘inclusion and diversity’ in the arts enabled her to create Monuments to Incompleteness, a body of work exploring her personal experience of prosthetics. Residencies and projects brought new ideas and skills in moving image, sound and collaborative practice - including working with Science Museum archives for Adorn, Equip, and collaborations with Clean Break Theatre Company to explore through film the effect of performance on self-image and identity. Recent themes include the role of performance in many disabled people’s lives, the performance of ‘normality’. In 2014’s film The Fitting Room, Nicola worked with a group of amputee women to devise sequences that represented their personal experience of body image and limb loss.

Public engagement through the process of participation is an important part of her practice. In Swiss Cottage Gallery exhibition, AT HOME: A Living Centenary 1914-2014, Hospital staff, London Ambulance, District Nurses and Social Services all participated in re-enacting a 1934 photograph of Nicola’s mother celebrating her 20th birthday: attempting to construct a family narrative in spite of a world erased by dementia, in parallel with WW1 Commemorations encouraging the nation to remember. In 2017’s pop up exhibition SPIRIT HOUSE, she used estate agent iconography to display a community’s personal and historical archives, representing complex narratives of loss and dispersal.

'Monument to Incompleteness' (2000); press-moulded earthstone; detail

Check out Nicola's website   See all the artists we work with

---

Banner image: Nicola Lane - The Fitting Room (2014); film still. A prosthetic leg in beige tights is leant against a brown leather chair in a living room.