NIKA NEELOVA
ARTIST STATEMENT
Often utilising reclaimed architectural materials, Nika Neelova is interested in the way materials and architecture influence our sense of time and place. Bypassing straightforward means of fabrication, her work is concerned with finding modes of retrieving and revealing information that is already there and the multiplicities of histories concealed within it as a way of finding and imagining evidence of human pasts through inanimate things.
The sculptures are often created by employing tactics of 'reverse archaeology' - considering an alternative reading of human history by examining found objects and architectural debris, and transforming them beyond functionality. In these works the human body and touch remains as a vestigial memory. Drawing arcs between different time periods and disciplines the sculptures form part of larger cycles, temporarily arrested in their current form. Neelova attributes high importance to material transformations often inspired by the latent potency immanent in the materials.
The sculptures are often focused on the conversions involved in translating existing objects into other mediums, decoding and recoding their purposes, enacting the processes that were used to shape them, altering their internal structures and liberating objects from their meaning. Matter precedes the object, despite being inevitably tied to it and the processes Neelova borrows and amplifies to shape the work, whether entropic, chemical or manual, are usually processes that have been previously affecting matter naturally. Her installations are often conceived of as speculative archeological sites, unearthing various debris and salvaged materials from lived-in environments, reconciling recognisable day-to-day objects with meditations on geological flows and deep time.
This manifests itself in works that hover between the organic and the synthetic; between the remembered collective past and an attempt to glimpse into the future. Unearthed layers expose mutated ruins and explore the fluidity of matter through parallel, contradictory and disparate timelines. Her vast body of work, exploring how the human body, the architectural space and the geology of the earth intertwine, touches on the occurring ecological catastrophe, and the anticipated anthropocene, balancing the tension between human bodies and human-created environments and their understood, but potentially mutated inherent power structure.
BIO
Nika Neelova lives and works in London, where she received her Masters Degree from the Slade School of Art, after graduating with a BA degree from the Royal Art Academy, KABK. Her work has been exhibited in the United Kingdom and internationally, recent solo exhibitions include ‘Very Like a Whale’ at the Santorini Museum in Greece (2023), ‘Thaw’ at Noire Gallery in Turin (2023), ‘One of Many Fragments’ at the New Art Centre, Roche Court (2021), ‘Silt’ at Brighton CCA (2021), CELINE Art Project curated by Hedi Slimane for Celine London (2021), [ъ] [ы] [ь] at Garage MCA (2021), ‘Ever’ at The Tetley, Leeds (2019).
Selected group exhibitions include: ’(Everything) is not what it seems’ curated by Mara Ambrosic for the Piran Coastal Galleries Museum (2023) & NITJA museum, Oslo (2022), From Birth to Earth, Parafin, London (2023), ‘Frieze Allied Editions (2021); ‘Her Dark Materials’ curated by Philly Adams (2021), Art Newspaper 40th Anniversary project (2021), ‘She Sees the Shadows’ curated by Olivia Leahy and Adam Carr for DRAF & Mostyn museum, Wales (2018), ‘Seventeen. The Age of Nymphs’ curated by Daria Khan for Mimosa House, London (2017), ‘Theatre of the Absurd', Green Art Gallery, Dubai (2017).
Nika Neelova was awarded the Kenneth Armitage Young Sculptor Prize, the Land Security Prize Award, the Royal British Society of Sculptors Bursary Award and was the winner of Saatchi New Sensations. In 2017 Neelova attended an alternative study program organised by the Wysing Art Centre in Cambridge. In 2019 she was awarded the Arts Council National Lottery Grant supporting the development of her practice.
Nika Neelova first gained recognition for her large scale sculptures and sculptural installations, depicting complex, imaginary environments that suggest a place or a landscape out of time. She participated in numerous residencies and her work is represented in various public and private collections internationally.
... and their phantoms, 2023-2024
Fossilised shark teeth set in clay, oil paint
Images courtesy the artist and Noire Gallery
The decapitated rose stems are made from fossilised shark teeth, some from extinct species dating over 30
millions years old, set into hardened clay, thereby bridging the futility and short life span of flowers with
the vast temporalities of deep time. The rose, as we know it, dates back to at least the Oligocene epoch
(about thirty-three to twenty-three million years ago). In Ancient civilisations roses were associated with
various deities, widely used to adorn temples, they also appeared in ornaments, cosmetics and cuisines.
The rose acquired stronger symbolism and religious connotations during the Middle Ages, particularly in
painting traditions and Gothic architecture. A notable Medieval example is the Rose d’Or from 1330 by
Minucchio Jacobi da Siena that can be seen at Musee Cluny in Paris. This delicate rose is made up of thin
pieces of gold leaf forming stems, petals and foliage. Thornless, the rose is an evocation of Paradise. The
oldest known records of fossilized shark teeth are by Pliny the Elder, who believed that these triangular
objects fell from the sky during lunar eclipses. According to Renaissance accounts, large, triangular fossil
teeth often found embedded in rocky formations were believed to be petrified tongues of dragons and
snakes and so were referred to as "tongue stones" which were commonly thought to be a remedy for
various poisons and toxins; they were used in the treatment of snake bites. The title of the work references
‘Some Roses and Their Phantoms’ (1952) - a painting by Dorothea Tanning, in which she transforms the
idea of domesticity by introducing a still-life of roses mutating into mysterious and anthropomorphic
forms. The roses, reminiscent of insect-like unnamed creatures seem to multiply and converge with their
phantoms. Tanning wrote about the painting “Here some roses from a very different garden sit?, lie?,
stand?, gasp?, dream?, die? […] As I saw them take shape on the canvas I was amazed by their solemn
colours and their quiet mystery that called for – seemed to demand – some sort of phantoms. So I tried to
give them their phantoms and their still-lifeness.” Similarly, the decapitated roses, nostalgic for their
former completeness, remind us in their ghostly presence of dead flowers, ancient petrified plants, a
strange archeological artefact or an unknown skeletal formation..