Nicola Moss

Nicola Moss creates enveloping, intricate paintings inspired by her garden just beyond, the hinterland that surrounds, and by the far-flung public parklands of Japan.

Nicola Moss’ home-studio sits at the top of an alarmingly steep, twisting driveway overlooking a peaceful, hidden valley in the Gold Coast Hinterland. Just minutes from the ever-growing suburban sprawl of the city’s northern suburbs, this old dairy farming country, once known as Sullivan’s Farm, has been home and inspiration for Moss for over twenty years. Here she and her husband, Phil, have created the ideal home and studio for her rich paintings of surface and pattern. From multiple studio windows, windows that flood the space with the requisite perfect light, are views of fully bedded in gardens (currently growing just on the right side of wild), of rocky outcrops and local birdlife busily going about their day, of an enviable vegetable garden below and the greater valley beyond. It is impossible not to be inspired by the relationship between what is happening on the canvas and what has been created outside, by the ongoing back and forth between this particular version of nature and this artist.

After studying printmaking and drawing from 1997 to 2001, Moss began making artworks and exhibiting in smaller galleries. During this period she continued to develop her technical skills and to explore different materials, laying important foundations. It would be another five years though, until 2006, when she would begin to find a specific focus for her work, to dive deeper into the themes and ideas of ecology and community to create the paintings that she is known for today.

Moss’ canvases are full, stretcher to stretcher, of the details of nature and specifically of gardens. She is interested in the power of gardens and the crucial role that nature plays in individual lives and in the community. These paintings are created through a process that combines collage, drawing, and printmaking. It is a culmination of years exploring these mediums, synthesising them into an individual approach that perfectly serves its purpose. The process begins with white Kozo paper that is painted in an array of colours, from thin scrapings of paint to intricate stencilled patterns. Moss builds a kind of vocabulary for a suite of works, and a set of tones and textures to be deployed. Stacks of paper adorn the studio benches waiting to be selected for a composition, cut out, and pasted onto canvas. The resulting paintings, canvases wrapped in a kind of paper skin, take us outside and into the garden—up close. Rather than grand vistas, rather than looking out onto the landscape from a distance, her work is about stepping into nature, where the recognisable forms of trees, rocks, and water—rendered in pattern—envelope us.

The newest body of work, Listening to Nature, 2024, is drawn from Moss’ own garden and from gardens experienced on a recent residency in Japan. In large cities, parklands and gardens are often all too rare sites, eked out where possible. Moss notes that many of the remaining parklands in Japan’s cities are remnants of palaces and temples. These sites perform a crucial function, allowing a population all but cut off from the natural world the opportunity for connection to it. This relationship between populace and nature is something that Moss has explored through multiple projects. She spent time in nearby Redland alongside local Bushcare workers as they undertook their conservation work, leading to a 2010 exhibition, Plant – Life, at Redland Art Gallery, Cleveland, Queensland.

In 2014, Moss spent time in Grafton, New South Wales, as part of the town’s drawcard annual Jacaranda Festival. Again, this was a chance to examine firsthand the relationship between community and nature, of the myriad ways in which people connect back to the environment.

Moss was commissioned in 2020 to make a suite of new paintings for the opening of the new HOTA Gallery, Gold Coast. The resulting body of works, Local Air, saw her return to her home setting, that perfect valley in the Hinterland, for inspiration.

The 2020 global event of COVID-19 brought into renewed focus Moss’ relationship with nature, and in particular, the elements of the natural world that were occurring around her. Moss created a series of paintings that spoke to the ongoing happenings around us, of nature taking place. Through several of these works is a horizon line of hills, a landmark of sorts viewed from within the area and from further afield. Local dryland rainforest trees and hoop pine are depicted along with elements from Moss’ formal and vegetable gardens. This was an exploration of the artist’s own personal connection to place, of both the natural landscape and of the garden built within it. The largest work from the series, The rock called the hills replied, 2020, is now part of the HOTA collection. Acquired to mark the occasion of the opening of the gallery, it is forever a record of the importance of our natural surrounds during this fraught time.

Leafing through stacks of paper—painted, stencilled, printed, and drawn upon—laid out across Moss’ studio in advance of her upcoming exhibition, Listening to Nature at Arthouse Gallery, Sydney, I am struck by the array of surfaces she has created. Some quick and watery, some deliberate and intricate. She doesn’t know what part of a painting these elements will be used for when she makes them—whether a streaky late-in-the-day orange will become the bark of a strong, deep-rooted tree or the scrappy, summer foliage of crawling underbrush. There is a looseness that is maintained in building up this world. I notice the shape of a rocky outcrop outside one of her studio windows and then find it on a canvas, made using a pattern of looping lines. On another work I see the same pattern deployed on a larger scale. Its orientation shifted ninety degrees, it becomes the repeating lines of a retreating garden path.

Moss has built herself a way of looking anew at the familiar. In depictions that are recognisable, are navigable, she captures the everlasting magic of stepping outside, of the change in things as the light of the day shifts across a precious, peaceful, hidden little valley.

The final, inevitable message of such gently and thoughtfully composed work is of care and conservation: conservation of the greater landscape and of the personal and civic spaces that can connect us back to it.

This profile was originally published in Artist Profile, issue 67 

EXHIBITION
Listening to Nature
19 September – 12 October 2024
Arthouse Gallery, Sydney