Nicky Foreman b. 1970

Nicky Foreman was born in Waitara in 1970 and graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland in 1992.

Foreman has exhibited regularly in Auckland, New Plymouth, Wellington and Christchurch. She completed a three-month residency and exhibition in Vallauris, France in 2005 and has also exhibited in St Tropez, France.

Foreman’s work is often concerned with taking everyday mundane objects and resetting them, so they can be viewed as precious and beautiful. Her work can be viewed in two ways, as small icon-like pieces and as a work in its entirety. The difficulty in this is to create an innate sense of balance, wherein the viewer's eye is not pulled in any one direction, but rather "floats" across the surface picking up different aspects.

Foreman uses oil paint with an assemblage of other materials. She manipulates her materials and invents for herself new techniques that evolve through her everyday practice, giving a sense of alchemy to her artwork. Using gold, silver and copper leaf, wax, inks, and shellacs, she engenders tactile historical surfaces.

Gabrielle Amodeo states of Foreman’s work;

‘The most overwhelming feature of Foreman's recent work is the residence it takes up between Taranaki and the south of France, the collision of two landscapes. Foreman has a deep connection to both landscapes, but it is the type of romantic connection born out of distance and separation. The bond she has comes from brief stints of travel, and the memories she carries back home. It is the quixotic connection of travel: time enough to fall in love or re-kindle an old passion, but not a marriage as such, not a full and immersive relationship. The Taranaki landscape becomes an old and grizzled lover waiting at home, whereas the French landscape sweeps her off her feet with its bright hues and soft light’.