Feral
Tori Nicole
Opening reception: Friday, August 9, 6-10pm
Closing reception: Friday September 6, 6-10pm
I am in my most feral form when I am working in the studio. During those hours, I can forget human expectations and follow my natural instincts simply as a creature. The catharsis felt through creative process has kept me alive the last several years as I’ve experienced an enormous amount of loss and hurt.
Tori Nicole
Opening reception: Friday, August 9, 6-10pm
Closing reception: Friday September 6, 6-10pm
I am in my most feral form when I am working in the studio. During those hours, I can forget human expectations and follow my natural instincts simply as a creature. The catharsis felt through creative process has kept me alive the last several years as I’ve experienced an enormous amount of loss and hurt.
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This exhibition is a collection of work I’ve made during this period of grief and healing, as I’ve been reinventing how I want to exist in the human form. “Feral” is about reconnecting to the creature within me without submitting to shallow ideas of how I’m supposed to act. I look to serpents for their embrace of solitude and natural demand for respect. I look to flowers for their endless contribution to the earth and critters, and their lack of resistance to their life cycle each season. I express this sentiment through sculptures, textile art, paintings, and drawings, many of which incorporate repurposed materials. Old sketchbooks, a wedding veil, fluff from wool rugs, and pieces of my first quilt are a few elements of the past that I’ve incorporated into some of these artworks. Through this work, I hope to create more curiosity and acceptance around grief, sadness, and ferocity, rather than holding those feelings captive. By embodying this feral nature, I learned to advocate for myself, and found a deeper connection to the untamed creatures that live alongside us. |
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Tori Nicole is a queer, self-taught, multi-disciplinary artist, creating out of her studio in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and started working as a baker when she was 15. She moved to Los Angeles in 2013, where she continued to work as a pastry chef in fine dining restaurants while doing freelance photography. During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, she was laid off from her restaurant job and moved to New Mexico where she began to pursue visual arts.
Her primary media are textile, sculpture, and acrylic. She started sewing wearables from secondhand garments and fabric scraps in response to feeling discomfort in her body. Through that process, she found a love for sewing as a craft and began creating textile art and soft sculptures. In her work as a painter and sculptor, she combines physical techniques learned through pastry and sewing to create tapestries of discordant colors and textures, which express different emotional states in the form of characters and environments. She finds her inspiration from the otherworldly details of nature and enjoys highlighting the small beauties that tend to be overlooked.
From 2021 - 2023, Tori created a donation-run art gallery and studio called Garagedoor Gallery, where she curated and hosted several group exhibitions featuring the work of local artists. Currently, she is focusing on her individual practice while also working at Textival Rug and Textile Workshop as a rug restorer, where she is expanding her knowledge of textile art through weaving.
Her primary media are textile, sculpture, and acrylic. She started sewing wearables from secondhand garments and fabric scraps in response to feeling discomfort in her body. Through that process, she found a love for sewing as a craft and began creating textile art and soft sculptures. In her work as a painter and sculptor, she combines physical techniques learned through pastry and sewing to create tapestries of discordant colors and textures, which express different emotional states in the form of characters and environments. She finds her inspiration from the otherworldly details of nature and enjoys highlighting the small beauties that tend to be overlooked.
From 2021 - 2023, Tori created a donation-run art gallery and studio called Garagedoor Gallery, where she curated and hosted several group exhibitions featuring the work of local artists. Currently, she is focusing on her individual practice while also working at Textival Rug and Textile Workshop as a rug restorer, where she is expanding her knowledge of textile art through weaving.
