Mending the Divine (2023)

Mending the Divine, an impressively large river stone, split in half, is stitched through the middle thanks to an oversized needle and thread recovered from an obsolete clothesline. By working with a natural stone in an unaltered state, Nicholls evokes Californian artist, Woods Davies’s precarious and gravity challenging constructions which seem to defy the very properties of the material he works with. Nicholls’s choice of a found material is for the material to remain a river stone first and foremost, inclusive of its intrinsic properties, regardless of the artist’s subsequent intervention upon its integrity.

The rough stitching of the stone expresses the artist’s anxiety when it comes to the breakdown of our physical, infrastructural and ideological environment. Living close to the bush for the better part of his adult life, the artist has experienced firsthand how nature repairs itself over time and how the breakdown of one element gives rise to the birth of another, without the need of human intervention. With Mending the Divine the artist reflects on our responses to changes in our natural environment; does it need to be mended, or should it be left alone?