Nickola POTTINGER

Nickola Pottinger, Genkle Jesus meek and mild, 2023, Wood, Paper Pulp, Pigments, Oil Pastels, Gold Leaf and Hair Clips, 16 x 16 x 12 inches, 40.6 x 40.6 x 30.5 cm

Mrs is very pleased to present like yuh neva lef’ yaad the gallery’s first exhibition with Nickola Pottinger.

Pottinger’s sculptures contain objects and memory: her work explores themes of legacy, regeneration and reincarnation informed by her family’s origins in Jamaica. Calling many of her sculptural forms ‘duppies,’ the Jamaican Patois word for ghosts, Pottinger’s works shapeshift between figure, animal and furniture. They contain references to family lore while haunting the present. A tool central to her practice is the hand mixer, co-opted from her mother’s kitchen, which she uses to whip family archives into paper pulp. The shredded paper is upcycled into a new malleable state and acts as a clay to be molded into body shapes.

Pottinger, trained in drawing, relies on automatism and instinct to address her materials with an immediacy. She works on her constellation of sculptures all at once: reused, collected or broken pieces serve as an origin point, get combined, or invite a painterly treatment. Cast hands, her own, feature prominently, clasping in prayer next to passages of deep green and metallic golds to suggest the everlasting or holy. To these combines she adds natural materials such as a Brancusi-like Yagua leaf which may get integrated as a duppy’s tail, a wing or a chair back. Improvisational elements give levity to the rough, concrete-like denseness and sturdiness of her forms.

In fry fish an festival, Pottinger animates a carved bench with the head and snout of a crocodile, an animal that, during times of drought, keeps their water supply free of disease by eating harmful bacteria, while its burrows provide refuge for other species seeking hydration. Pottinger balances this benign aspect of the natural world with Duppy x Redhills, a chimeric creature hanging on the wall who offers an expression of shock or sorrow. Its eyeless gaze is matched with a gasping canine mouth, ears made from animal bones, front legs curling forward. The figure flips from horror to humor to pathos, a cycle of comedy and tragedy. Redhills offers spiritual protection while the vulnerability of a work like St. Ann’s – palms facing upward, hair baubles decorating wrists, upright Catholic school posture – brings us back to a softer moment from the artist’s youth.

This new body of work emerged following a trip back to Kingston, which coincided with extreme weather that led to months-long drought and subsequent water rationing. The residue of these events, as well as her noticings of the changing landscape–familiar forests and beaches now eroded due to the colonizing force of resort culture–gets channeled into Pottinger’s work, as does the joy of reuniting with family members and seeing again her grandfather’s home he built with his hands. The hybridity of these works and their meanings–suggesting characters both powerful and ordinary, symbols of life mixed with collected objects–allows Pottinger to shift seamlessly between material and memory, to recall her family stories and regenerate them anew.

-Emily Davidson

Mrs.
6040 56th Drive, Queens, NY 11378

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