Salt Spring artist Nicola Wheston’s new show
On picturesque Salt Spring Island, B.C. lives a British-born artist who has become well known for her life-size narrative work. “It’s always been the every day and people’s stories that has interested me,” says Nicola Wheston.
Wheston has come a long way since her art school days at the Ruskin School of Drawing at Oxford University four decades ago. She came to Canada in 1976 as a 22-year-old. “When I came to Canada I was so happy to be in a country where there was not such a rigid social structure, and so much wilderness, less crowds with no rigid class system where one’s life was set out from the start,” she says.
But her style of narrative painting was “frowned upon here,” she says. “It was in 1990 when I put all inhibition of my painting aside and went back to following my own path of large-scale narrative paintings in using oils, and I continue to do so.”
Today, her art is informed by her British training and style, as well as her deep appreciation of nature and “living in Canada in small communities close to wild places in British Columbia.”
Her new series, Stuff: We Become Our Things and Retrospective, is a look at consumerism and its impact on the environment.
New art exhibition Stuff: We Become Our Things and Retrospective
Opening at the San Juan Islands Art Museum on September 15 until November 26, 2018, her paintings take us through the cycle of life of our stuff, where we buy it, and where it ends up — showcasing the consumerist pathology of our times with eight paintings that take us from the big box store, straight to the garbage dump and landfill.
Because she paints from direct observation, she literally built a berm of garbage she had collected in order to create her huge canvas paintings.
Cutting close to the bone, Wheston’s work expresses her desire to illustrate the rapid rise of the norm of consumerism in the era of plastics and how the system is showing its cracks.
Nicola Wheston’s inspiration
Wheston’s inspiration for her series began when she had the misfortune of clearing the estates of deceased relatives. One, a hoarder, proved especially daunting. These experiences galvanized Wheston’s awareness of the real impact of our consumer society and how unsustainable it is. Her new series, five years in the making, highlights this effect and helps transform our relationship to ourselves, as well as to our stuff.
“We now live in a society where we are drowning in ‘stuff,’” says Wheston. “Plastic fills every inch of our homes and we are building bigger and bigger homes to accommodate all this stuff. In the end, ‘stuff’ ultimately entraps us.”