Jackie Nickerson (b. 1960, American-born British; lives and works in London, and Ireland) uses photography to materialize her thinking. Her research-based practice stems from extensive, years-long study of histories, processes, places, and peoples before she introduces her camera into the space. Often interpreted as documentary, her photographs layer complex relations and intersections that arise from her knowledge base.

FARM (2002) represents Nickerson’s turn away from conventional thinking and technical rules. To convey the visual terrain of those laboring in hours of intense sunlight, she altered the images, desaturating and decentering, to deliver a complex fidelity in her photographs about the materiality and organic work of the land in Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique and South Africa. Nickerson lived for five years on a farm in Zimbabwe in the 1990s, in addition to two years of research and travel in the Sub-Saharan region, which informed her choices about how to present the personal and political nuances of farm labor.

For FAITH (2008), she studied the limited palette and tools available to the early Renaissance painter Fra Angelico over two years, which offers a lens on the visual origins of devotion for her muted and restrained portraits of Irish Catholic monastic life. In TERRAIN (2013), she further challenges conventional notions of making portraits and landscapes, showing the hybrid relations of person and agricultural labor. In an interview for Cult magazine, Nickerson said, “TERRAIN is about us in the landscape, how we change the world we inhabit at every moment of our being human, and how, for better and for worse, the world that we make, in turn, changes who we are.”

These notions appear in her most recent body of work, FIELD TEST (2020), where figures and spaces are shrouded in plastics. Her precision, investigating and choosing the individual components of each composition, creates astute portrayals of the anonymity and alienation produced by techno-industrial, commercialized globalization. Nickerson’s photographs require physical presence; across an image, the subtle shift in focus, saturation, contrast or camera angle introduces low-grade visual noise that slips audiences into their own perspective, enjoining a responsibility for sight and insight.

Her work has been exhibited in many museums including the Museum of Modern Art, Salzburg; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Mudam Musee d’Art Moderne, Luxembourg; Galleria d’Arte dell’Istituto Portoghesi, Rome; National Portrait Gallery, London; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Sunderland Museum; Harn Museum, Gainesville; Vatican Museums, Rome; Hereford Museum, UK; Abdijdmuseum Ten Duinen, Belgium; and Benaki Museum, Athens. Her photographs are held in many collections including Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; the Vatican Museums, Italy, FL; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, KS.

She is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York.

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