Nicole Early

Nicole Early’s paintings are characterised by all-over patterns, the result of automatism and the subconscious in her painting process. Abstract, but uneven in their markings and gestures, the paintings give space to pareidolia, the tendency to perceive meaning from ambiguous objects or patterns. If such ways of seeing are, to some degree always embedded in the process of viewing art, they are accentuated in Early’s work. Optically, parts of the image force their way to the foreground, while other areas recede to the background, a sort of illusionistic Rorschach test.  

The surrealists were famously advocates of automatism in art, and we might detect notes of Hilma af Klint’s abstract painting in Early’s work. Certainly, there’s plenty of overlap in how we view the work, abstraction in both cases being the ground from which the viewer untangles a web of possible references and meanings, constantly reminding us that the more we look, the more we see.