About the Artist:
Nicole Havekost is a fabric-based sculptor fascinated by bodies. For her, bodies are magical and glorious and gross and bewildering. While we may actively influence the processes of our bodies, we cannot control any of them fully. Coarse hair grows in places that were once smooth. Lungs take in air, bones degrade. Once pregnant, the same body now hosts faltering hormones. Despite love, wounds ooze. Havekost recognizes that she must accept it all as both revelation and horror. It is fundamental to being human. Her work is the outlet for her compulsion to explore this exquisite, repulsive organism that exists beyond our desires and authority.
Havekost’s work of the last several years has centered on themes of the feminine being through the body, hybridity and contrast, scale, and disruption. Through all these works, hand-stitching, irregular seams, and nasty knots are part of her process. These are the visible representations of the making and mending, repairing, and refinishing we are engaged in as human beings daily.
Stitching, sewing, constructing, assembling is work that Havekost has been doing this to make bodies and body parts for over twenty years. Piercing, pulling, closing; each stitch is both aggressive and restorative. Stitching is an act of accumulation – it is a collection of marks, moments and attachments that give shape to a form. Sewing these forms, she comes to rest in her body more fully.
More about the Artist:
Havekost is an artist, parent and educator living in Rochester, Minnesota. Her own work is varied in media and technique but linked by her interest in material and process. Nicole received a Minnesota State Arts Board Creative Support Grant this year and was a 2022 Mcknight Fiber fellowship finalist. She is a three-time Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant recipient and a 2018 Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council Advancing Artist Grant recipient. Nicole recently exhibited work in a dual presesentation with Dreamsong at Frieze Los Angeles. She is currently readying work for the two-person exhibition Conversations at the South Bend Museum of Art. Nicole earned her BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from the University of New Mexico.