Nicola Hicks
Nicola Hicks emerged as a leading sculptor in the mid-1980s for her distinctive roughly-textured sculptures of animals. Her quick rise to prominence began during her post-graduate education at the Royal College of Art (1982–5), after studying first at the Chelsea School of Art (1978–82). Hicks achieves the visceral texture of her sculptures by building straw and painted plaster over a steel mesh frame, sometimes to be casted in bronze. The overall appearance retains that of a rough sketch, with the finish helping to capture the inner drama of the subject whilst illuminating the vitality of drawing to the finished sculpture.. Applying plaster over a steel-mesh frame enables quick working and reworking of each sculpture. Her task, she says, is ‘to get tenderness into something cold, movement into something static and grace into something lumpy’. Full of charm and menace and resolutely unsentimental, her sculptures - typically of animals and semi-mythical beasts – suggest a dark or peculiar narrative. Some of her sculptures are site-specific, such as The Fields of Akeldama (The Fields of Blood) (1986) in West Cork, for which she carved the forms of dead and dying animals using Irish clay, to be washed away by the rain.
