I’ve been a working artist, curator, community activist and teacher for more than 25 years, creating and producing intimate solo performances, large-scale public happenings, socially engaged interventions and performance art workshops and lectures. My practice extends across black boxes and white cubes, art fairs and subway stations, international festivals, and single bathroom stalls. I’ve operated an artist-run newsstand in a vacant subway station kiosk, a soup kitchen for artists, a breast milk tasting bar, and a performance festival hub for kids. I’m forever inspired by the rebel queers, renegade witches, and other dyke moms I run with, and bound to many brilliant artists, activists, spell-casters and healers. For many years I made performances that drew from my own experiences of trauma and transformation, intimacy and motherhood. More recently, I’ve experienced a shift in my practice, where my attention has turned to wider theoretical questions about the nature of performance itself to ask questions about when, where, how we perform - in theatres and galleries, on social media, and in our everyday lives.
I am a mixed media artist, exploring themes of the Maternal, Relationships, Sexual Politics and the Cycle of Life.
I am particularly attracted to Flora's life cycle; I link these to human experience using Anthropomorphism and Pareidolia, these are documented via Photographs & Sculptures, where inspiration from the natural world has become fundamental to my practice.
My sculptures are made from non-traditional materials, based on seeds, their shape & form are often reminiscent of human body parts
Currently my work focuses on pregnancy, motherhood and in particular the dynamics of Mother-Daughter Relationships, Since becoming a Mother myself, I have become obsessed with trying to document 'Moments' & 'Memories', and the 'Essence of my mother', in an attempt to understand the complex relationship that I have with my own mother.
Over the last 10 years I have been developing an artistic practice which is rooted in image making and spans live work, documentations of its products & traces and the re-presentation of these in other forms. With performance at its core, I investigate themes around feminism, abjection and ritual with a focus on interpreting or creating experiences in my own body. I have an active interest in the anthropological body, exploring the ways that social, cultural and political dynamics shape the perception and understanding of the human body and how these interactions are interpreted through social engagement how they are controlled through mass media and the arts.
In 2014 I created 'Raising the Skirt' in collaboration with Dawn Felicia Knox, which has since had international success being named one of Dazed and Confused's photo series of the year 2015. RTS is a multi-layered arts project which calls for the (re)claiming of the cunt, we are working on representing a diverse and fierce femininity through re-appropriating the defiant act of raising the skirt which is buried deep into many of our cultures.
'Landing in Her Skin' began in the spring of 2015 and aims to document the transition of woman to mother and back again, being a mother comes with its own otherness, this project will follow the lives of women and their ever changing body.
Biography
Born in North East England (UK), Nicola Hunter (formerly Canavan) has been performing and showing work nationally and internationally since 2007 within programmes such as Momentum Festival (Brussels), ]performance s p a c e[ (London), Inbetween Time Festival (Bristol), City of Women (Ljubljana) and SPILL National Platform (Ipswitch). She has collaborated with Predrag Pajdic, Manuel Vason (Double Exposures) and Ernst Fischer and has been awarded the Artsadmin Bursary, the Artists International Development Fund and has been financially supported and mentored by Unlimited, Live Art Development Agency and Pacitti Company.