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nicole k shaffer

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About

 

I make site specific installations that encourage heightened embodied awareness by intentionally altering the way bodies move through and/or are activated in space. I employ feminized craft techniques (floral design, embroidery, natural dying, and herbalism) to manipulate materials. My practice involves undergoing physically immersive processes (sleeping, showering, dancing, meditating, living) in/with materials and sites as the work is formed.

I've slept in a bed made for mourning. I danced with plants at sites where I  experienced sexual assault and used those plants to guide embodied movement through gallery space. I made mirroring wild sweet peas arches memorializing sites significant to my matrilineal history. I created ephemeral installations in the apartment I grew up in that honored the complicated poetry my father experienced in psychosis. I wove thousands of seed carriers into the negative space of my bathroom, altering the accessible space available to me and guiding my body into a secret contortion as I moved through private space in preparation for my workday.

My current work involves creating plant based memorial installations at sites of trauma in my matrilineage. Moments when and places where parts of self were lost or went dormant at the hands of violent masculinity. I've been studying folk plant medicine of my ancestry with the intention of using these medicinal plants to create installations that will appease the ghosts lingering in these spaces. I interpret this literally, poetically, politically, and personally. I’m interested in remembrance of repressed histories forcibly erased through colonialism, capitalism, internalized oppression/misogyny, and bodily trauma. My primary entry point for this remembrance is through embodiment and relationship with plants.

 

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nicole@nicolekshaffer.com

 

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