Join us at our November virtual artist peer group, an opportunity to hear from two artists about their practice. Our peer groups provide the space for artists to share active ideas, projects and challenges, with peer support from audience participants.
Our artists this month are Nicola Lewis-Dixon and Ester Natzijl.
The event takes place over Zoom with a break in the middle.
Cost
Pay What You Can / Free
Image: Nicola Lewis-Dixon
Nicola is multidisciplinary artist from a photographic background who deals with the taboo subjects of female life, such as sexism and assault. Her recent work came about accidentally after her hysterectomy, following long complications after cancer. “I had never valued my body, but I was at an all-time low with my relationship with myself. I had had my female identity taken away and I was lost.”
Nicola took to wild swimming to heal physically due to the swimming pools being closed and having so many lockdown restrictions. During a winter swim, she was videoing a leaf under the water, the leaf happened to pass over her arm, drawing attention to her goosebumps. “Suddenly I videoed my arm and felt a surge of warmth and appreciation at this tiny life-saving act.”
“The triptych 'goosebumps' installation became expanded on this tiny moment of reclaim and a cathatic journey after repeatedly handing myself over to have parts taken away. Consisting of beutiful swims, juxtiposed with sterile hospital images and footage.”
Nicola is looking for support in developing her project, thinking about who to approach and how, to broker conversations around cancer, women’s identity, fertility, menopause and reclaim. She is also interested in running workshops.
Image: Ester Natzijl by Rosie Powell
Ester Natzijl is a performer and theatre-maker. Her background is as a contemporary ballet dancer at Introdance and the Netherlands Dance Theatre, from which she switched focus to combining dance with acting, mime and puppetry and creating her own multi-disciplinary performances and acts. Since 2018 Ester has lived and worked in Brighton where she has worked as a teacher for Stagecoach, South East Dance & Sussex Dance Network and as a dancer/puppeteer with Vincent Dance theatre and with her own productions with Ester Natzijl Projects.
Ester will be sharing her work in progress Finding Grace, a tragi-comic solo about a writer, Heinrich von Kleist, who is looking for Grace in his life. Tormented by doubt, he imagines himself to be the newest guru who can put modern man out of his misery. He wants to do this by proving that Grace is hidden in the example of the puppet. We become witnesses of his struggle, his pain but also of the power of perseverance and belief through dance, text and puppetry.