Clare Nicholls

About the Artist

Clare Nicholls is an artist and educator living and working in Baltimore, Maryland. Clare is a weaver, zinester, maker, etc-er who loves touching soft things and is obsessed about knowing everything. Formerly the manager of The Shed, an exhibit makerspace within the Maryland Science Center, she wrote programming and taught workshops focused on STEAM education in informal contexts. Her professional goal is to connect people to process. Clare earned a BA in Art and Art History from St. Mary’s College of Maryland in 2010, and obtained a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from MICA in 2013. She most recently showed work in Ritualisms at the Target Gallery within the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, VA in January 2019. She has also shown work at the School of Design Gallery at Stevenson University, Boyden Gallery at St. Mary's College, and the Riggs and Leidy Galleries at MICA. Her work engages with language, memory, history, and when they turn the corner too quickly and run into mythology.

Artist's Statement

Weaving is the marriage of image and object, building fabric from scratch. The revelation between empty warp and finished cloth feels mythic: at first there was nothing, and now here is something. Weaving tells stories, textiles are connected to text. The rhythm of shape and color in my tapestries is a poem. A line of color running up the side is marginalia. The knots that finish the cut ends are a signature. I dye my own yarn to brew my own vocabulary; I salvage yarn from thrift stores and by unraveling sweaters to reclaim words that have been lost to me. I weave because weaving sits at the center of all of these influences simultaneously, and these influences cannot be disentangled.