Wednesday 6 November 2024, 4:15pm to 6:00pm, School III, St Salvator’s Quad, University of St Andrews
We are delighted to be hosting Everlyn Nicodemus for the inaugural CCA artist in conversation, supported by the Octavia Elfrida Saunders Memorial Fund – Free, all welcome.
This in conversation event will coincide with the first ever retrospective exhibition by artist, art historian and curator Everlyn Nicodemus (born 1954, Marangu, Kilimanjaro, Tanzania) hosted by the National Galleries of Scotland (Modern One) from 19 October 2024 to 25 May 2025.
Leaving her Chagga community at the age of nineteen, Nicodemus later studied social anthropology at the University of Stockholm, Sweden. She rejected its imperialist methodologies to become an artist and academic who centres the narratives and agency of women globally. Nicodemus has been based in Edinburgh for the last fifteen years.
Since the 1980s, Nicodemus has made cycles of paintings, collages and works on paper that explore feminist resistance, violence against women, personal trauma and the isolation and dehumanisation of living within structural racism. More recently the artist’s work has received renewed critical attention. There is growing interest internationally in reappraising a significant career that is uncompromising in its feminist ethics, intellectual rigour and commitment to giving voice to the marginalisation of women by making visible their shared traumas and experiences. The NGS retrospective exhibition celebrates her return to painting after a hiatus of more than twenty-five years. It honours the artist’s commitment to and rethinking of oil painting and celebrates her newly commissioned works in the medium, supported by the Freelands Award 2022.
Born in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania in 1954, Nicodemus’ life has been marked by movement: herself part of a moving diaspora which she documents in her writing and art making. Moving across Europe her experience of racism and cultural trauma has prompted the creation of a unique body of work encompassing paintings, collaged ‘books’ and mixed-media assemblages as well as poems, using unusual materials to explore human experience, from metal nettings and sisal to textiles and found objects.
Nicodemus’s work has been included in solo and group exhibitions including Hacking Habitat: Art of Control, Utrecht, Holland (2016); 18th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2012); Bystander on Probation, The Brewery Arts Centre, Kendal, UK (2007); Crossing the Void, Cultural Center Strombeek, Brussels, Belgium (2004); Displacements, University of Alicante, Spain (1997); Vessels of Silence, Kanaal Art Foundation, Kortrijk, Belgium (1992); and the solo exhibition Everlyn Nicodemus, National Museum, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (1980).
Please join us afterwards for a reception at the Wardlaw Museum, 6-7pm.