Deborah Schamoni

Working primarily with sculpture, photography and collage, Nicole Wermers draws our attention to the overlooked gestures and rituals performed in urban settings. Centring her practice on the public realm and its interactions with the female body, Wermers combines references to art history with modern surfaces, dissecting everyday design and its appropriation by consumer culture.

By reconfiguring familiar objects and infrastructural elements into new forms, Wermers examines hierarchies of materials while addressing systems of social actions and relations. Her works frame and transform their environment, prompting us to consider how materials and design read as societal and cultural indicators. The artist has recently started sculpting figuratively by hand, using the canonical trope of the reclining female figure to dissect politics of consumption and display the invisible labour of maintenance workers.

For Lismore Castle Arts, Wermers will create a large-scale installation in response to the castle and the space at St Carthage Hall. The work will embody themes which reflect her continued interest in invisible labour and the ‘body-economic’, drawing on the phenomenon of marathon dance competitions in Depression-era America.

The exhibition is accompanied with a text by Katrina Brown, founding director of the Common Guild, Glasgow.