Fay Nicolson

I teach on the BA Fine Art Course across L4 and L6. I am currently a L4 module leader and have also been L6 Year Leader. Alongside my core teaching activities, I have delivered specialist sessions, particularly around the use of drawing as a tool for thinking and developing a practice. I have also developed student facing diagrams that allow students to visualise the curriculum and assessment criteria in a holistic and personalised way.

In 2024 I developed and delivered a talk and seminar for MA Fine Art students exploring tacit knowledge and educational structures.

Courses taught

• Fine Art BA (Hons)

I work in the space between performance and painting, exploring the nature of images through a range of media. My studio practice draws from diverse sources, including my own experiments in movement and music, my knowledge of reprographic and digital processes, and my research into modernist and avant-garde interdisciplinary projects. I am interested in embodied knowledge and pedagogical methods that are synaesthetic or cross disciplinary. I have undertaken classes in Dalcroze (a modernist method of music education that uses movement) and improvisation (via Independent Dance). These physical experiences have introduced somatic models of inhabiting and training my body/senses that I bring into a visual arts context and further explore through image making.

In 2025, I synthesised elements of this diverse practical research into a methodology for exploring performance and image within the context of Fine Art. This was shared as a workshop with students at Norwich School of Art. The workshop aimed to introduce ideas of mover and observer, improvisation and choreography, somatic/semantic, and first and third person imagery. This helped students think through issues surrounding collaboration, representation, figuration, and documentation in their own practice.

My transdisciplinary research feeds my studio practice, generating experiences, sensations and material to work with in image form. At present I am concurrently making bodies of drawings and paintings that mutually inform each other. My paintings provide occasion for improvisation, collage, and play. They contain a lexicon of marks and gestures; autographic and reprographic, pattern and motif. My paintings provide a space to develop this visual language, which spreads out across surfaces, repeating and mutating. In comparison my drawings are focused and contained. They offer a document of action in the studio, as artist and artwork dance together. The drawings compress time and fracture space to suggest impossible corporalities. The cut-and-paste logic of digital is slowly reproduced by the analogue hand, a contemplation on the ubiquity of the mediated image. For me a studio is more than a workplace, it is a construction. A mythical residue from a time when empty industrial buildings were cheap and available. The studio is a space of theatre and performance, a stage for the play of being an artist.

In 2015 I curated PLAY SENSE, an exhibition, symposium and series of workshops exploring connections between Art Education and Documentation. This took place at Gerald Moore Gallery supported by ACE and Eltham College.

In 2020 I founded Salome Salon, an online platform for discussing art making and the intersections between contemporary painting and performance practices.