Nicky Hodge

Playing with notions of memory, loss and transience, Nicky Hodge creates paintings of half-remembered landscapes: people isolated on streets, objects remembered from childhood, parts of buildings and planes fading into backgrounds. Abandoned, a new series, takes the eerie, empty shell of a derelict caravan as its starting point. Half glimpses through the net curtains lead to a questioning of where outside becomes inside and an awareness of the hidden layers that might lie trapped inside the image.

Mobile Homes, a series of nine paintings, is based on images of neat plots of land belonging to static caravans in a Kent caravan park. The series Little Toys explores feelings of isolation, bewilderment and alienation: a lone baby clutches its bottle; a pink seal contemplates a massive leap into the dark and a penguin skates over the thin ice.

Small Memories is an ongoing series of tiny, fragmentary images that do not permit a fixed reading: the story is there for the viewer to construct. Relying on partial views grasped in passing, these oil paintings on chunky blocks of wood are displayed on a shelf like an incomplete jigsaw or toy soldiers waiting to be moved around.

Nicky Hodge was born in Birmingham. She studied Fine Art and Critical Studies at Central St Martin’s, graduating in 1992. Confinement, a series of 80 compressed charcoal drawings housed in perspex boxes, was selected for Reclaiming the Madonna, a show that toured to five UK cities in 1994- 95.

Hodge’s paintings were included in the groups shows Outdoors (2006), Sense and Nonsense (2003), Bittersweet (2001) at Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art, where she also had a solo exhibition in 2001. In 2005 Hodge’s work was selected for Deptford X, and in 2007 she cocurated Close at Hand at Contemporary Art Projects in Hoxton. In 2009 she has shown work in Abergavenny and had an installation of 61 paintings in an artists-run space in Peckham. A former Deputy editor of make, the women artists magazine and author of two books about art, Hodge works as a Curator of Information and Research for the Government Art Collection.