Brian Nichols
dis – INTEGRATION
Opening Friday March 1st, 2019 6-10pm
Gallery hours: Saturday March 2, 9, 16 & 23 11am – 4pm
Closing Saturday March 23, 11am – 4pm
for private viewings please contact Brian at

Workshop info here

While weaving, especially when limiting the work to white, my mind is able to reflect on my own experiences as well as reflect on my perceptions of the outer world. The working space creates a detachment from, as well as an attachment to my life, that often resists examination.

This show consists of a series of small, mostly white weavings that hold personal found objects often related to decay or brokenness. The objects, like the stations of the cross, invite contemplation and reflection.

Since childhood I have been a collector of things that I find as I walk the paths of my day. The items go into my pocket or knapsack and later end up on my desk or on the window sill of my studio.

Over the past year, as I’ve struggled with an autoimmune disease, I’ve been more interested in the beauty that can be found in broken things: the objects that I now reclaim as valuable. They get re-made into art objects that ground me and help me to see the world in a different manner.

The objects incorporated into the weavings have links to the places where they have been found. Most of the broken medicine bottles have been found on the banks of the Otonabee River, in Peterborough. The bones have mostly been picked up while hiking on Change Island, Newfoundland.

The square headed nails have largely been found in our vegetable garden as I dig it each spring. My maternal grandfather was a blacksmith, in Lakefield.

As I reclaim broken objects as valuable, I reflect on my own dis-INTEGRATING life to also be who I am now, and that I too, in my illness, am content and more than enough.
~ Brian Nichols

Article from the Peterborough Examiner, with Taylor Clysdale