Creation Stories
A reflection on Creation: The First Three Chapters by Sylvia Nickerson. An exhibition at Casino Artspace, Hamilton, ON, January 2017 and a limited-edition zine, published by Nickerson, Hamilton, ON, 2017.
By Amanda Jernigan
Cover image from the comic zine Creation. Image credit: Sylvia Nickerson, 2017
I have just unpacked, from a box unopened since I moved to Hamilton in 2010, exhuming them amid a rain of packing peanuts, some small sculptures by Sylvia Nickerson. They have travelled with me since I was an undergraduate. Each sculpture comprises a piece or several pieces of sanded but unfinished softwood, to which a wax figure is affixed — sometimes several figures — with a simple configuration of copper wire. The figures are small, less than two inches high, and abstract — androgynous, their features undefined. Their attitudes vary. In one sculpture, a figure and its pendent double stand poised at the intersection of two crossing wires, funambulists at a point of decision. In another, six wax figures are poised at regular intervals along a wire arc, in a Muybridge-like representation of a leap. There’s another from the series — this one not in my collection — in which two figures face each other to either side of a wall, like the prisoners in Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace: Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. … Every separation is a link.
There was a long period when a small sculpture garden of Nickerson’s wax people adorned a mantle or bookshelf in my husband and my various successive abodes. The sculptures — small meditations on situation and relationship — came to constitute a kind of vocabulary, for me, a language of positional and orientational metaphor. They helped me to think about where I was in life, and who was there with me. Then we packed the figures away for one more move, and this time — because of space or time or work or children — they did not get unpacked. Until now.
I have been thinking about Nickerson’s wax people because a few months ago I went to see her exhibition Creation, at Casino Artspace: a 3-D installation of material from and related to her graphic-novel-in-process of the same title. The story of the graphic novel is intensely personal: the speaker moves to Hamilton, makes art, marries, becomes pregnant, gives birth, and haunts the grimy precincts of her downtown neighbourhood in the somnambulant but sometimes visionary trance of new motherhood. Wiped clean by sleep deprivation, existentially disoriented, she becomes a kind of tabula rasa for the often difficult stories she sees unfolding around her: poverty, violence, the displacements of gentrification. I used to know things, she says. Things I learned from books. Things I read in school. / Now what I know are our bodies, and these streets.
Sample page from chapter three of Creation. Image credit: Sylvia Nickerson, 2017
This is a narrative that I know to be autobiographical, if transmuted here by art. Yet most of the figures in the graphic novel, including the figure of the speaker, are grey-filled, animate outlines: archetypal figures, like the little wax sculptures. They are images of negative capability: emptied-out, but also open for the reader’s or viewer’s inhabitation.
When we were students together at Mount Allison University in the late nineties and early two thousands, I knew Nickerson primarily as a sculptor — though she worked in other media as well — one of the bright lights of the fine arts department. Her sculptures were weird biomorphic assemblages: she used pink dental moulding material to make casts of body parts, and her apartment was strewn at any given time with plaster or bronze torsos, noses, ears, all waiting to be gathered up by art. The visceral nature of her sculptures, their piercing intimacy, was counterpointed by a classical sense of composition and proportion. She studied mathematics alongside fine art, and her works would often put the inorganic forms of that discipline into conversation with the bodily or vegetal forms she had cast or sculpted. When she moved to Ontario, in 2005, Nickerson traded fine art for the history of science, in her academic life; in her studio life she traded sculpture for painting and drawing, eventually performing a quiet takeover of North American illustration venues from her Hamilton studio.
I honour the democratic impulse that led Nickerson away from the more rarefied genre of fine art to the more popular genre of illustration: she once told me that she’s never been comfortable making art for a coterie. Yet I have to say I have missed Nickerson the sculptor. When I walked into Casino Artspace, then, I experienced a joyful flash of recognition. The first piece in the show was a sculpture, a life-sized, life-like wax hand. It was as if the wax people of our mantlepiece sculpture-garden had grown up and gotten personal. Held in this wax hand was a drawing of an infant. The old medium cradled the new, here, just as mother cradled child. At the same time, mother cradled artist, and artist mother. A multiply resonant icon, it made me catch my breath.
Entering the gallery space, I was greeted by works on paper — the original ink-wash drawings for the first three chapters of Nickerson’s graphic novel, neatly alligator-clipped and hanging in staggered rows, on the walls. But the images were constantly escaping their two dimensions: spilling out into sculptural installations in the middle of the room and along one window sill, and onto the ceiling. In the window-sill installation, by Nickerson’s son, Colin Neary, the images escaped their artist, too: here, the infant whose birth is at the centre of Nickerson’s creation story became, before my very eyes, a child, a boy, an artist, his colourful, painted monster-figures overtaking his mother’s monochrome city. It was a literal relinquishing of control on Nickerson’s part, and as such a brilliant enactment of her exhibition’s themes: the loss of control that comes with new parenthood; the new, raw entry into the fray of life and mortality that one makes when one participates in creation in this way.
Cloud figures from installation of Creation: The First Three Chapters, at Casino Artspace. Image Credit: Cathy Coward, The Hamilton Spectator
Nickerson gave me a copy of the limited edition zine she produced to accompany the exhibition. It is to some extent a prototype, a promissory note that suggests something of what this work might be in an eventual, elaborated, printed form. I don’t want to judge it as a finished work, then, but I do want to reflect briefly on some of what is lost and found in the translation between the page and the gallery.
The printed version, which one must experience page by page rather than in the immersive simultaneity of an installation, introduces an element of elapsing time that adds to one’s experience of the story. It has a book’s intimacy and privacy. I go back and forth on the question of how much this serves the story. Certainly, it suits the private mind-space of the work, which takes us very much inside the speaker’s head; yet this is also a work about public spaces, and experiencing it in the public space of the gallery reminded me of that. The zine is artfully designed, making canny use of enlargement, reduction, repetition, and juxtaposition of the drawings, in order to tell its story. But reading it now I miss the deep blacks of the originals on display in Nickerson’s installation; I miss her son’s exuberant intervention (which is also her intervention, as she invited him into the space); and I miss that arresting, physical sense of the words and images escaping their bounds.
I am not a frequent reader of graphic novels: it’s a genre that is for the most part unknown to me. Perhaps Nickerson’s powerful installation work will ultimately be a bridge that can bring a viewer like me into the genre — and into other, future, printed versions of Creation. (The installation “ends”, if we can say that of an installation, with the words “to be continued.”) On the other hand, perhaps Nickerson has moved through the genre of the graphic novel into something new (and this not necessarily to the exclusion of the graphic novel) — a hybrid form that fuses artist and illustrator, printed page and three-dimensional space. I think of the crucible from which I once watched Nickerson pour molten bronze, when we were students. It reappears in the opening pages of Creation, with all of downtown Hamilton pouring into it or possibly out of it: a metaphor for destruction, metamorphosis, and rebirth.
There’s one further thing that I want to say about Creation. For all that motherhood is an archetypally creative experience, and although it’s written about and illustrated to exhaustion in parenting books and blogs, and on all our scattered Mistagram and Chitter feeds, the space of new motherhood, in its averbal intensity, is still a great mystery. I feel a shock of astonishment and welling gratitude, then, when I see art like Nickerson’s that has somehow emerged, an authentic expression, from that space.
Like Sylvia Nickerson, Amanda Jernigan grew up in Ontario, went to school in New Brunswick, then moved to Hamilton, made art, married, and had children. She is a poet, essayist, and editor.