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In the past few years, the city we live in has expanded quickly and as inner-city living becomes popular, there are more restaurants and coffee shops than ever. Unfortunately, this is accompanied by a slap-dash aesthetic, where uncomfortable interiors are seen as redeemable, even praiseworthy, if executed in interesting hues.
The obnoxious luxury of these colours is what carries fashion along, be it in interior design, clothing or cosmetics. One moment lime, the other mint, then apple, then emerald. So it continues the silly spiral of fashion; one which invents new colours only to create a commercial need for distance from the previous season. Such are the toxic types of colours for which people are employed to create names. Citing a canny awareness of this very excess, Helen Nicholson blends these colours together in her palette. The artist discards the usual context of moulded perspex and polished chrome for material like toilet rolls, wine corks and sticky tape rolls.
To begin, Pretty Sticky is a series of framed, vertically striped paintings. Nicholson sifts through the domestic environment to produce thin strips of coloured paper and material. They are part of a continuing project. A couple of degrees softer than a Bridge! Riley, the works tend away from the headache of Op Art towards a blended colour scheme. Only barely insinuated by the strips of veneer contact and floral bonding, some of the paintings verge upon 'landscape'.
The artist addresses each corner, each part of the gallery, with her work. A corner with plumbing pipes and crumbling concrete on the floor provides a frame for fungal- like cardboard curlicues, which creep up the pipes, as though art is bubbling up through