Artist: Barbara Nicholls

Patrick Heide presents a new solo exhibition by Barbara Nicholls entitled Between the Tides.

Oscillating between chance and control, Barbara Nicholls investigates the possibilities and limitations of pigment, water and paper, translating her experience of the landscape into abstract watercolours. While drawing, she reflects on natural formations encountered or imagined: tide mark lines on beaches, creeping glaciers and moraine deposits, cliffs and quarries with their shifting forms of geological strata revealing traces of past events and the slow movements of the earth.

The final works are visual embodiments of the experimental processes conducted in her studio - a space that functions as both a laboratory and a site of discovery. Fluid shapes intersect, colours bleed and evolve into one another, and organic lines, reminiscent of the earth’s shifting edges, emerge through her methodical yet intuitive approach.

Nicholls’ operations begin at times with large-scale sheets of heavyweight paper laid flat on the studio floor. The physicality of her practice is vital; she moves across and over the surface, first guiding water into pools or creating delicate lines with transparent washes. Once water touches the paper, it no longer remains flat, requiring Nicholls to carefully manage the buckling surface as she introduces pigment, experimenting with how much liquid the paper can handle. The drying process can be natural or carefully controlled through appliances like electric fans and heaters, which create microclimates that accelerate evaporation, allowing layers of colour to settle and crystallise over time.

Nicholls’ studio practice is a continuous commuting between spontaneity and precision, frequently at the crossroads of deciding whether to accept or resist the direction the liquid pigment takes her. “It’s important to get lost, but not completely,” the artist states. The feeling of self-loss is conveyed in Mesosphere, contemplating the piece is like gazing into a vast lake, drawn in by what lies hidden beneath its layers of water. For Nicholls, the creative process mirrors this sense of tentativeness, yet in reverse. As she makes the work, she can only imagine how it will ultimately appear. The translucency of the watercolour offers a glimpse through time, revealing all past actions in a single work.

In her recent works Nicholls 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. In works such as Airwave, 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.