Michelle Nikou

To encounter a work by Michelle Nikou is to experience alchemy in everyday life. Her installations, sculptures, drawings, prints and tapestries invite reflections on subjects as broad as domesticity, the environment, politics, consumption, poetry and art history, at the same time evoking our own memories and lived experiences. While Nikou’s work is highly intuitive and motivated by the idea of chance and the surreal, the processes of casting, welding and textile fabrication are all structured and labour intensive. For the most part, the objects incorporated into her installations are not altered in scale or form, but are transformed by the act of creation and the materials selected to represent them as sculptures – from leather to bronze, ceramic to lead, or chocolate to white metal. These transformations focus our attention on the world of materials – their associations and histories – and the ‘fiction inherent in personal interpretation’. (1)

Nikou’s use of text in her work, in particular the importance of her titles, expands the potential of relationships and conversations between the objects. no sound of water. Behind him the hotdogs split and drizzled (2021) juxtaposes lines from two of the 20th century’s most significant poets, T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) and Sylvia Plath (1932–1963). Their deeply personal observations disrupt notions of truth and objectivity in a complex world. Nikou’s work draws from the discipline of poetry, her restricted colour palette akin to the limitations of language in a written or spoken form. Her practice is an exploration of her private universe, a poiesis that continually extends the act of making, the thing made and the world itself. 

no sound of water. Behind him the hotdogs split and drizzled invites a meditation on our individual place within a world consumed by a global pandemic, climate crisis and systemic inequity and inequality. Australia exists in an extended period of ‘human biosecurity emergency’, (2) with our national borders closed to prevent the spread of a virus that has devastated countries around the world. As communities across Australia entered various phases of ‘lockdown’, the panic buying of essential home items such as toilet paper made national and international headlines. In a work from 2005, That’s what me and the others think, Nikou silverplated a cardboard toilet roll, a humorous and somewhat prophetic insight into the Australian psyche.

The familiarity of our domestic environments during lockdown can evoke loneliness as well as comfort. In no sound of water. Behind him the hotdogs split and drizzled, cast plates are arranged in a dishrack that sits atop a standing structure, alongside cast unopened nondescript tin cans and two solid white metal eggs. The central sign of human existence in the installation is a well-worn pair of men’s office shoes. Cast in bronze, they offer familiarity and tenderness, support and protection in uncertain times. Like a line drawing made in three dimensions, white strips of neon hold down a lid on top of a structure and contain a stack of bowls. This containment adds to the feeling that life has been shut down. On the wall is a large wool rug depicting a plug. The idea becomes apparent that during 2020 our lives came to a standstill. In this new decade we await the release.