Nicole Price

I Can Still Smell Her Perfume II

Jackson's Art Prize 2025
Oil
Fabric
100 x 80 cm

“My recent work centres around memory and the object. I have a particular interest in the everyday things that we collect, acquire, and that accumulate around us and the associations that they hold. They open doors to another time, occasion, people and place; heirlooms that convey a sense of melancholy, loss and longing. These possessions act as familial archives for countless shared experiences, carrying invisible markings from the lives and rituals of our predecessors. Their presence depends on sentimentality. They fight for space in the home, a jostling claustrophobic clutter, that become the stage backdrop to our existence. I paint these as a way of memorialising, whilst losing myself in the shape, pattern and texture of the painting as a way to escape the burden of this stuff, and the frantic culture of acquiring. As I paint the collections grow, the irony is not lost on me.”