Artist Statement
My practice is concerned with two streams of contemporary experience: Modularity and Density. As a painter, I work across abstraction and realism, and am preoccupied with creating surfaces that achieve a haptic sense of attention and time. My paintings often reference textiles, particularly silk, linen and velvet, through building many layers of transparent pigment washes, which act as a medium for thinking about kinds of time.
My works are made both as an individual/singular piece as well as a fragment of a whole. I seek a modular and spatial logic from my works, where they can be reconfigured together endlessly – creating new hybrid combinations. Over the last few years I have also experimented with tapestry weaving, which allows an alternate and more somatic process of creating densely temporal surfaces, one line at a time. I like to consider my tapestries as momentary configurations of wool and silk, which may one day be unwoven for another purpose. Temporal in nature. My practice is also influenced by my reading blunt female-centred non-fiction (Cusk, Garner, Modjeska etc), speculative science fiction, and writing on systems collapse.
Bio
Nicole Clift is a visual artist and writer working in painting, tapestry weaving and installation. Nicole has exhibited across public, private and artist-run galleries including the Art Gallery of South Australia, PADA Studios - Portugal, Post Office Projects, FELTspace ARI, Central Gallery, Staff Only, Floating Goose Studios, Newmarch Gallery and Firstdraft gallery, Sydney.
In early 2026, Nicole participated in the International Studio Program at PADA Studios, Portugal for 2 months working on new spatial and architectural approaches to painting and tapestry weaving, with support from CreateSA and the Ian Potter Foundation. This culminated in an group exhibition held in Barreiro, Portugal curated by architect/curator Sérgio Fazenda Rodrigues.
Two tapestries woven on this residency were selected for the 2026 Fleurieu Biennale Art Prize. Another 2026 tapestry was selected for the Petite Miniature Textiles Award (biennial) at Wangaratta Gallery, Victoria.
In 2024 Nicole was commissioned to create new work for the 2024/5 major survey exhibition Radical Textiles for the Art Gallery of South Australia, exhibiting alongside works by Sheila Hicks, Sonia Delaunay, Kiki Smith and more.
Nicole’s writing has been commissioned by fineprint magazine, the 2024 Neoterica exhibition publication, various solo exhibitions held in South Australia as well as the 2025 Wakefield Press monograph on Dr Sue Kneebone. Nicole holds a first-class Honours degree in Visual Art (2019) from Adelaide Central School of Art, South Australia.
Nicole’s studio is currently located at Post Office Projects, Port Adelaide, as part of their 2026/7 Studio Programme.
Photos: Rosina Possingham