Nicola Atkinson

Nicola Atkinson is an internationally acclaimed multi-disciplinary artist and designer whose career has been influenced by time spent on the West Coast of America, in Sweden and living in Glasgow. Her dazzling public artwork specialises in place-making, social cohesion and community engagement and is displayed in museums and landscapes across Scotland, the USA, Cuba, Iceland and Europe.

She is the founder of the participatory art and design studios NADFLY (2003 - 2020) and Beautiful Materials Design Studio (2018 - ongoing)

Her practice is organic and generative, specialising in place making, social cohesion and community engagement, with a commitment to the delivery of well-conceived and durable artworks that inspire and prompt actions, interactions and reactions.

These interventions have been both large and intimate in scale and have influenced behaviour, changed community identities and formed active relationships with the built environment.

Her company Beautiful Materials Design Studio have exhibited at 17th Venice Architecture Biennale , V&A Dundee 2021. You can hear her talk on “Art Came in the Night”; a documentary on public art for BBC Radio 4 2022, presented by artist Kevin Harman. A example of her public artwork is The Memory Tree, 2023, at Aberdeen Union Terrace Gardens design by LDA Design. A memorial crafted in Scotland using high-grade stainless steel.

In 2024 she worked in Winchburgh, Scotland Creative Identity Framework, coming up with a unique concept of Winchburgh Historic Portals, which act as a gateway and record that links to something bigger and more detailed. Designing artworks which have been installed at the three sheltered bus stops on Main Street. The bus stops were a perfect site for the artworks, as a very important link between the Winchburgh community and the surrounding area. They are bright on a dull day and fantastic on a sunny day.

Since June 2023 she has had several studio spaces with Outerspaces, in offices & shops in Glasgow, Marks & Spencer shop in Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow. , Call center in West Regent Street, Glasgow, the Granite House Glasgow city centre and from Feb 2026 City Park in the east end of Glasgow.

Solo show at Linlithgow Burgh Halls Friday, 23 May 2025 to Sunday, 21 September, 2025.

As the artist & curator she open Beautiful Materials Gallery in the Avenue Shopping Centre from 15 Nov 2025 -3 May 2026, as the artist & curator. Creating four exhibitions, Vessels, Present, Love Me and Stuff etc showing 50 artists

Clients have included museums, hospitals, architects, third sector and local authorities from across Scotland and internationally. She has had numerous exhibitions in international venues including Long Beach Museum of Art, CA, USA, Tramway and The Lighthouse, Glasgow, Scotland, Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales, Havana, Cuba, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands, The Museum of Modern Art, NY, USA and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, UK.

Nicola Atkinson by Michael Wilson

If there is one universal emblem of both domestic utility and family ritual, it’s surely the vessel. Cups, dishes, vases, and bowls have been fixtures of still-life painting ever since Willem Claesz Heda, Willem Kalf, and other artists of the Dutch Golden Age used them to demonstrate technical mastery while commenting on the material culture of their time. In its formal simplicity, the vessel also continues to offer endless possibilities for creative variation, both as a subject of representation and as an object in its own right. Nicola Atkinson’s repeated use of the ubiquitous form as both visual motif and social unifier resonates with her abiding interest in the intersection of art and design, and in the ways in which these fields change and evolve when considered in the context of community and the practice of everyday life. For Atkinson, these familiar containers hold not only physical stuff, but also the ideas of both artist and viewer. They have the capacity to enclose and convey nascent thoughts and, as urns, to preserve their fragmented remnants.

The centrality of the vessel in this exhibition also reflects Atkinson’s interest in the discipline and history of ceramics. And just as most ceramic forms have been glazed and fired before arriving at their final, permanent shape, so Atkinson’s printed images have undergone a process of material transformation that goes beyond simple manipulation at her own hand. Beginning as small-scale paintings on repurposed wood panels — which themselves began as discarded loom components — they have been enlarged and reproduced onto unstretched sheets of fabric to create a group of hanging banners. Despite the peculiarities of this concluding format, however, the gestural quality and translucent coloration of the original renderings prevents the works from appearing rigidly heraldic — they’re too individual and too irregular for that. Instead, they feel closer to ornamental tapestries, or even to the accidental compositions that appear on ground sheets in the course of interior decoration.

Atkinson has referred to vessels in several other projects over the years. In 2013’s All You Need, for example, she enquired after the subtle impact that a set of hand-molded off-white crockery might have on the everyday lives of eighteen Glasgow households, causing its users to become newly aware of their own habits and idiosyncrasies by introducing a new set of “essential” objects into their established routines. No Manners (2015–16), which began life as a collaboration with Benedikt H. Hermannsson centered on a set of unique porcelain bowls, arrangements of which were used by musicians in a sequence of live performances at project space Mengi in Reykjavik, artist Stephen Glassman’s loft in downtown Los Angeles, and a storefront in Berlin. And back in Glasgow, Crumples (2020) involved participants choosing which of 366 delicate porcelain containers they felt fit best into a closed hand. Each piece was marked with a date in the coming year—hence the number of objects—anticipating a future moment of positive change.

Atkinson’s use of unstretched velvet as a support for the paintings adds associations with both luxury and kitsch. This distinctive fabric also has a highly tactile quality, to which an added top layer of lightweight georgette adds an ephemeral dimensionality. The practice of painting on velvet, which originated in Middle Ages Kashmir, achieved popularity in the rural United States during World War II following American soldiers’ discovery of Hawaiian artist Edgar Leeteg (1904–1953). In the 1990s, the practice underwent a further revival after new painting factories in China and India kicked into high gear. It feels appropriate, then, that Atkinson has printed, not brushed, her images onto the fabric, employing an industrial process rather than producing the works entirely by hand. (She employed a similar strategy in her project Drip (2024), using the aesthetic filter of the paint-to-photograph-to-print sequence to “test the strength” of each composition while it was being made.)

In its embrace of repetition and avoidance of context beyond that which is provided in the gallery by a timeline of the artist’s career, Atkinson’s project evokes the work of German artist Peter Dreher, who painted the same water glass placed on a table in his Black Forest studio more than 5,000 times over a forty-year period for the series Tag um Tag guter Tag (“Day by Day, Good Day”) (1974–2014). It also echoes Allan McCollum’s Perfect Vehicles (1985–), an extended series of identically shaped but differently coloured and scaled sculptural interpretations of a single traditional Chinese ginger jar. McCollum’s vessels, which sometimes reach incongruously monumental size, have no openings, eliminating their expected use-value and turning them into, in the artist’s words, “an homage to the idea of one thing standing for another.”

But while Dreher applied a crystalline realism to his Zen like undertaking, maintaining an uninterrupted focus and introducing only subtle variations in pursuit of representational mastery, and McCollum maintains a rigorous consistency and neutrality in the making and presentation of his physically sealed yet metaphorically available containers, Atkinson’s approach is all about improvised alteration. In this, her undertaking is perhaps more resonant with the work of an earlier artist, Giorgio Morandi, whose outwardly modest still life arrangements achieve a transcendent beauty though their silent interaction with ambient light and space. In Atkinson’s work, the aesthetic and the functional continually overlap and change places, the ordinary continually exceeding or stepping outside our expectations, the artistically rarified turning out to be more accessible than we might have imagined.

Finally, Atkinson again reaches out into her immediate surroundings and compounds her audience through several strategic additions to what some viewers may have thought of as the exhibition proper. Look out of the window and you’ll notice a bus stop on which further images of vessels, rendered in a flatter style and brighter palette than their ink-on-velvet counterparts, have been printed. Inside the gallery, meanwhile, the Wear Art Music event invites visitors to see and model original handmade scarves by the artist. A soundtrack of new ambient music produced with Belle and Sebastian’s Stevie Jackson resonates with the translucent Georgette fabric’s rich combination of colour, texture, and the movement. Finally, a model of the interior itself offers miniature takeaway versions of all the works on view, underscoring the themes of containment, scale, and transformation that run throughout the project and inviting viewers to consider the various ways in which we digest and distribute things—food, drink, art, ideas, life. May 2025

Nicola Atkinson Artist & Curator Beautiful Materials

Nicola Atkinson

Beautiful Materials Process

Nicola Atkinson by Michael Wilson

Nicola Atkinson Artist & Curator Beautiful Materials

Nicola Atkinson

Beautiful Materials Process

Nicola Atkinson by Michael Wilson

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