Nicola Marshall

My work is focused on exploring and interpreting the living details of different ecosystems.

I was born in rural New Zealand and so the environmental contrast between those forests and coastlines and Arizona's Sonoran desert, where I am now based is incredible and has deepened the kind of intoxication I had always felt in nature.

My paintings, simply put, are studies of flora and fauna, both the micro and the macro from various ecosystems in New Zealand, Wyoming and Arizona. They come from a need to express a personal sense of wonder at the diversity, beauty, inter-relatedness and sheer creative audacity of the natural world.

I often play with scale to make visible the smaller participants in a work, magnifying them for their beauty and relevance. I use simple materials like ink, charcoal, and a limited acrylic palette, and find myself working more and more with organic processes like dripping and diffusion, to create an ambient, abstracted background that provides me with many visual cues and suggests possibilities as to what may be included as the work progresses.