Essay by Josie Herrington, June 2012

Nicky Peacock had a serendipitous encounter recently. She needed a new mattress as her existing one caused her backache and lack of sleep. Walking through the suburbs to catch a bus she heard a van approaching. The van, which appeared from nowhere, contained – amazingly – mattresses, which the van driver was attempting to sell, literally, from the back of a lorry. From believing that this man was a complete charlatan to buying a king-sized mattress took about twenty minutes of protracted haggling, resulting in an expensive mattress obtained at a ridiculously cheap price.  The driver not only took the mattress and placed it in situ on her bed; he took away the old one free of charge.  Nicky then continued to the bus stop. She had just experienced the marvellous – a result of a freeing of the imagination, which, once liberated, allows strange and wonderful things to happen.

Andre Breton, the self-styled ‘pope’ of the Surrealist movement spoke passionately about this phenomenon. Breton believed that the rationality of the French bourgeoisie in the 1920s and its manifestation in government politics, resulted in a crushing of the imagination; he likened it to an animal pacing backwards and forwards in a cage. He argued that the job of the artist was to release this creature, thus creating the possibility of existence within a higher reality, a place from which rationality was banished and creativity came to the fore. But to allow this release the artist or writer needed to adopt a certain mind set, allowing entry to the strange and marvellous. This was achieved by a rejection of conventional mores and an acceptance that much of life is messy, chaotic, irrational, and odd.

We can confidently place Nicky’s work at the present-day end of a trajectory that began with Breton and like-minded artists. Breton’s key inspiration was the work of Sigmund Freud, whose obsessive trawls of the unconscious mind brought to light the dark desires and traumas buried within the human psyche. Breton’s celebration of the anti-rational was developed from Freud; both men believed that rationality was merely surface, the superficial veneer of so-called civilisation, the visible tip of an iceberg, seven eighths of which is submerged in the recesses of the unconscious mind, where true reality is located.

Nicky also celebrates the anti-rational. Like the psychoanalyst trawling through the unconscious, she trawls through today’s vast morass of cultural products both high and low, dark, and unsettling, sorting, selecting, and creating visual narratives that have their own internal logic. These are supplemented by her quirky, funny, and often hauntingly beautiful photographs, the whole collection forming online blogs which take the place of the traditional artists’ sketchbooks. She gleans material from pulp fiction, gothic horror, offbeat fashion, documentary photography, the novels of Murakami, real stories that are stranger than fiction and her own domestic environment.  Collector, curator, artist, and musician, she operates as a voyeur in the lives of others and in her own life, thus demonstrating a female gaze, described by Griselda Pollock as a searching look of pure curiosity. This curiosity, nosiness even, extends to all her activities.

What led Nicky towards developing her interest in the odd, the strange and the uncanny? Clearly, some of her life experiences. She was a sickly child although many of her illnesses were self-induced. She spent much time at home, her sanctuary, where she felt safe and happy and would tap dance, draw, make spells, and watch old films. Confined voluntarily, her early life was interior, magical, fantastic, and provided themes which have been constant – sinister dolls, horror films and the high kitsch of talk shows, magazine clippings of violent crimes and deranged, dangerous individuals. 

In her thirties, Nicky was once more confined, through developing a problem with her autoimmune system, resulting in disfiguring allergies which kept her either in the house or long periods in hospital.  She again found herself watching old movies and daytime television during endless days of illness and confinement which continued to provide the harvest for her interior life that was to mutate into her work.  The themes that were sparked in these periods of her life have continued to this day and create the rich tapestry of images and ideas that set her apart as a true innovator, one who brings the collective unconscious to light and makes us aware of the very strangeness of our existence.

It is easy to equate the life of the artist and the work she produces; such-and-such happened and it’s visible in the painting. But it’s not quite as simple as that. The artist is not necessarily speaking with her own voice but through a staged persona; this voice filters lived experience through the distorting lens of art-making practice and the result is more like a clamour of several voices, using the artist as a conduit. Nevertheless, from this clamour, Nicky was able to create convincingly a sense of her internal existence, her world of (largely) self-inflicted confinement. She developed memories of the sick room at school in her installation Sick Room, created for her degree show.  The work was obsessive, offering an overload of visual information:

Drawings and clippings of murderers, violent and destructive individuals Myra Hindley/Charles Manson and cohorts/Aleister Crowley/Reverend Jim Jones, schlock horror crime/detective vintage magazines / TV playing constant loop of horror film scenes – all carefully edited by me – Jerry Springer fight scenes – one after another – chaos, video nasties – original copies, all fuzz and distorted – hard to watch. The room resembled my nana’s house: pretty, busy patterns, suburban, froufrou, lacy tablecloths, and a million ornaments.

This is the world of Huyssman’s Á Rebours, (Against Nature) in which the protagonist lives life entirely indoors (with a jewel encrusted tortoise as a pet), a novel that exemplified the Symbolist aesthetic, and it’s the febrile atmosphere of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, in which a woman, confined and trapped by domesticity, believes the wallpaper in her room is changing and mutating and that a woman is trapped behind it. It is the internal world of the child in Guillermo Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, who invents horrific monsters which she battles and conquers in order to blot out the even more horrific reality of her existence. 

Nicky’s process of working appears intuitive, a natural outpouring of ideas, but these are ideas resulting from in-depth thinking and learning.  Her methods provide a template for other artists, would-be artists and even those who think of themselves as non-creative, encouraging the passive spectator to be an active producer - a method encouraged by the writer and philosopher Walter Benjamin in the 1930s (although under very different circumstances).  It is one of Nicky’s strengths that she can make complex activity appear effortless and spark off the will to create in others.  Her blogs work in this way, visual diaries that log the minutiae of her life through photographs and notes, they are accessible both physically and intellectually, demonstrating a method and a way of thinking that can produce interesting art without the need for complicated equipment or large studio space. They relate to her life, but a life one step removed, a life created by her ‘artist’ persona. Haunt Me, her most recent blog, began as a dialogue with her deceased father, who she hoped would come back and haunt her, but has morphed into a visual diary of her day-to-day life that includes the kitsch and popular culture that feeds her ideas.

The blogs act as triggers, motivating the viewer to move from spectator to producer, and this process is clearly at work in Nicky’s curatorial work.  Learning To Love You More, shown at the Baltic Gallery, Gateshead in 2009, alongside the Yoko Ono show, was an exhibition based on interactivity. The public were asked to choose and perform an action from a list of seventy, for example, taking a flash photograph underneath one’s bed, drawing a scene from a movie that made you cry, recreating the moment after a crime, or drawing a constellation from someone’s freckles. The results were displayed on the gallery wall and online – the online version was bought in 2010 by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  In Love Letters, a very diverse group of people, chosen by Nicky, were asked to produce a love letter in whatever medium they chose – it could be a poem, a film, a photograph or whatever. Both exhibitions struck a chord with their viewers – identification, recognition – and the results of the activities, love letters, views under strangers’ beds – made compelling viewing, but importantly, sparked off the creativity of the viewers, many going beyond merely looking, to interacting and participating.  This takes us back to André Breton and his compelling statement ‘poetry can be made by all’.

Artist, blogger, curator – Nicky goes through life as one of the people Freud described as the ‘antennae’ of society, more sensitive to the rhythms and currents that ripple beneath the surface of our day-to-day existence.  This takes us back to Breton, and his exhortation that one should be in a particular mind set to experience the strange, the unusual and the marvellous. Following the incident of the mattress, a gas meter reader came to Nicky’s house. Finding that she was an artist, he spoke with enthusiasm about his brother, who, he claimed, had a passion for drawing and liked nothing better than to create composite images from bits of Page Three girls, liked to draw Princess Diana and (whispered) was probably gay. Nicky visualised Dr Frankenstein, wearing a tiara and weeping over photos of Diana in a pie-crust collar blouse. Should she be afraid that she had let another oddball into her house, or should she celebrate yet another piece of information to be logged and used at a later date? Naturally, she chose the latter.  On some gallery wall, blog, or interactive encounter, watch out for that meter reader. The shadow of Andre Breton will be behind him, smiling with approval.

Further Reading

Benjamin, Walter. The Author as Producer. http://www.scribd.com/doc/8059339/Walter-Benjamin-the-Author-as-Producer

Breton, André.  First Papers of Surrealism. http://studiocleo.com/librarie/breton/bretonpage.html

Del Toro, Guillermo (dir) Pan’s Labyrinth. http://www.panslabyrinth.co.uk/

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/theliteratureofprescription/exhibitionAssets/digitalDocs/The-Yellow-Wall-Paper.pdf

Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Au Rebours. https://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/jkh/rebours.html

Pollock, Griselda. ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’ in Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art. Routledge 1988 pp. 50 -90