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Grant Recipient

“There is Beauty in Her Sacrifice,” 2020, walnut lath, steel nails, 10 in. x 12 in. x 22 in. Photo credit: Misha Kligman.

Gaylin Nicholson

Windgate-Lamar Fellowship

2025

My practice interrogates the union of nostalgia and labor through traditional sculpture materials and installation techniques. Working in ceramics, bronze, and wood, I reveal my personal memory in resonance with a collective history of labor and creation. My work asks how domestic places alter our lives and shape our identities. How do we transform these spaces in return? Coming from a family of farmers, mechanics, and carpenters, I see their touch and hear their tales echo in the world around me. I seek to excavate the myth, wonder, and secrets hidden in seemingly trivial memories. From the faded wallpaper of my mother's bedroom to a weary sigh of aging parents laboring for me, these modest moments become monuments to the labors that quietly exist around us.

Through traditional materials and craft techniques, I seek to imbue these moments with the weight of history and human effort. In using cast bronze, I build upon and challenge the ancient value of this material by burying it under plaster, paint, clay, or concrete to equalize the contemporary and the historical. I devote my work to ceramics’ sincerity, vulnerability, and domestic history by developing my clay bodies and using traditional hand-building techniques. Obsessed by the significance of place, my work employs the sensibilities of home construction trades. Using walls, doors, flooring, and windows, I lovingly craft distorted domestic spaces as a tribute to the labor of those who lovingly crafted me.

Bio of the Artist

Organization Background

Location

EDUCATION

SPECIALIZATION

Ceramics, Kansas City Art Institute

Institution

Grant amount

$15,000

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Selected works

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