Nicole Helen Brunner compellingly communicates an extremely personal journey across a wide range of media, including paintings, photography and works on paper. All of these subjects hold a significant importance in her private reflection. In the documentation of these subjects she makes a world that displays discarded items with the dignity that they might have received when they were new.
Nicole Helen received her B.A. in Visual Arts from Ramapo College of New Jersey in May 2009. Since graduating she has been exploring the many layers of the emotional effects of loss. She has also taken classes at the Art Student’s League and taught a life drawing/painting class at Solo(s) Project House.
Nicole Helen is a co-director of 1 Op Collective, a web-based emerging artists’ collective. There she manages over 30 artists and has co-curated four group exhibitions. She is currently preparing to teach an after school art program at a school in Brooklyn.
As a child I spent a good amount of time on my own creating artwork that reflected my interactions with the world and myself. Between the ages of 14 to 21 the art I created was intimate and introspective, which spanned a wide range of media, including paintings, photography and works on paper. I look at them today as a documentation of my experience of growing up as both the artist and as the subject.
Currently still using a wide variety of media my process of introspection has changed and I have stepped outside myself. My process begins merely by an inclination towards a subject that I come across, which then seems to become an obsession. I invest a great deal of time in exploring the subject drawing and documenting it. As a result of these obsessions I mistakenly hold several different collections consisting of discarded metal objects, statues, and fabric to name a few items. I mainly choose subjects based on texture and color.