SALA Artist - Nicole Smith

Artist profile

I enjoy creating art, mostly acrylic on canvas.  I live with ME/CFS. Art is something I can do around how I am feeling. I find it therapeutic and a way of confronting and dealing with personal issues but also hope, in a lot of my artworks, to get across messages about political and social issues affecting myself and/or others in society. 

Prospect, South Australia 

Gallery

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Artist Comments

Rest in peace me: This artwork is about the grief and loss experienced with long term illness that can feel like you are not really alive or living life anymore and the grief of constant realisations of all the things of yourself and your life that you have lost and continue to lose.

We are women too:  Price: $200 - This piece is about the lack of rights women with disabilities continue to have. Like the lack of a right to an equal income, the lack of a right to an income that even reaches the level of minimum wage, the lack of the right to keep their own income if they have a partner,  which also contributes to the particularly high numbers of women with disabilities who experience domestic violence. Like other oppressed groups , women with disabilities need real choice and control in their lives, not slogans, and this means a much more egalitarian distribution of resources and power. 

Mask:  Price: $100 - This painting is about the masks we put between ourselves and the world and people hiding both themselves from the world and the world from themselves. Getting by by deluding themselves about both who they are and what is going on around them. 

Wounded heart: Price: $200 - Well, we have all had our heart hurt. This is just a physical description of how it feels when you allow yourself to be vulnerable and someone gets into your life and heart and inflicts damage upon them.

Description of the artwork

Rest in peace me: Head and shoulders of a woman with black hair and pale white sallow skin, wide open mouth as if in anguish, red lips, eyes closed tightly, pink lily against neck, very white face, part face, part skull.

We are women too: head and shoulders of a woman in a hospital bed with dark hair, dark eyes and pale white mottled skin and hospital tubes. She is dressed and posing as Rosie the Riveter, a feminist icon from World War II. She looks anguished but determined. The words "We are women too" is written by hand across the bottom.

Mask: Head and shoulders of an androgynous person with short ginger hair and dull white skin. They are wearing a full face medium blue mask with a moulded smile. There are black crosses (XX) sown across the slits barely showing blue eyes. There is a brown background, almost like wood grain.

Wounded heart: a stylised painting of an anatomically correct human heart with a very large gash through the right side. There are blue veins and red arteries around it. The gash looks like it should be catastrophic, yet it also looks like it is "business as usual"

Copyright of all content (images and text) belongs to the artist credited. All work is used here with permission and shall not be used by any other organisation or individual for any purpose or in any way without express written permission of the artist.