Barbara Nicholls

Barbara Nicholls' monumental watercolour works emerge by manipulating the behaviour of pigment in ever-increasing quantities of water. As such, their production remains consistent with that of Nicholls’ wider body of work, where she has stitched, drawn, cut, built and extracted her media from archaeological/architectural/geological and other sites of significance.

 “Nicholls has followed the idiosyncrasies in the behaviour of her materials and has orchestrated them into resonant shapes that, while never declaring themselves in any specific identity, nonetheless touch collective memories of the experience of natural spaces, of the landscape. In that way, she formulates a new reality.”—Martin Holman

Barbara Nicholls says ‘When I create my watercolours on paper I recall places I have experienced and others I imagine as the work forms. Some seen and others sensed. I remember ancient meandering pathways; natural and man-made dams and bridges across rivers; the controlled carrying of water in aqueducts and canals; flooded fields with lines of debris left behind after the water has retreated; tide marks on beaches; cumulus clouds over hills reflected in ponds; coloured mineral and sediments forming lines on the banks of rivers; varying depths and shapes of geological layers in cliffs and quarries revealing past events and movements of the earth.

For her first solo exhibition at the gallery Between the Tides, Nicholls presented a new body of works. She went through stages of liberation, breaking boundaries she once imposed on herself. Earlier works carefully maintain the white margins around the central shapes or never cross the margins of the paper. She allows colours and compositions from underlying applications to spill beyond the lines and fill the voids, expanding the composition past the outer edge. These colours, applied with a wide brush from the edge, become spectral tracings of distant landscapes. Yet, they also integrate into the drawings through what Nicholls describes as "fleeting winds”, the marks left behind by a high tide on the sand, transient in time yet defining in its traces.

Exhibitions at the gallery:

Between the Tides, 2025 (solo)

Our Ancestors Bloom Overground, 2023 (group)

Barbara Nicholls, Diogo Pimentao and Francesco Pessina, 2022 (group)

New Forces Knocking, 2022 (group)