Naturals artefacts

Living in close contact with nature and attuned to her surroundings, Laurence Nicola draws inspiration from them to create multifaceted works that explore identity, the fragility of human existence, and the trials of the human condition.

This exhibition offers a sensitive perspective on the environmental changes we are currently experiencing. Attentive to the materials and forms produced by nature, Laurence Nicola’s approach is informed by her work collecting materials from natural sites.

Laurence Nicola observes that plastic is omnipresent and integrated into the planet’s biogeological cycles. It interacts with the life cycle of living beings. Hybrid elements emerge, the result of the transformation of industrial products through erosion. Laurence Nicola calls these modified elements ‘natural ready-mades’, witnesses to metamorphoses such as plastiglomerates 1.

Laurence Nicola makes use of various techniques (slides, photographies, installations…) to explore the relationship between plants, minerals and plastics. She brings forth landscapes of a wondrous nature. They reveal this coexistence between the natural and the artificial.

Laurence Nicola

Laurence Nicola’s latest installations serve as a pretext for cabinets of curiosities in which natural elements and collected artefacts intertwine. Deception and pretence are artistic devices used to depict the hybridisation currently taking place within our ecosystem.

Her works invite us to observe living things with keen attention and to forge links between our inner selves and our engagement how we engage with the world.

Laurence Nicola lives and works in Saint-Coulomb (35). She holds a Master’s degree in Fine Arts and a National Higher Degree in Visual Expressionfrom the Ecole Supérieure Nationale d’Art de Cergy-Pontoise, and received support from the Institut français for a research residency at the Kaywon School of Art and Design in Seoul, South Korea (2002), as well as from the Consulate General of France in Montreal (2013). In 2025, she won the L’il’ô sculpture competition on Île Saint-Denis. She is represented by the Galerie Ségolène Brossette in Paris.

laurencenicola.com

1. Plastiglomeres are agglomerations of plastic debris which, under the influence of heat (fires, campfires, etc.), fuse with natural materials (wood, sand, shells, rocks, etc.).