As a painters Niki has a developed sensibility in enabling process to define image and complex content. She explores the ‘wishes of paint’ as a subtle numinous medium, using intuition in tension with intention to inform the creative decision making.

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Niki works uses fluid layers of paint in mineral and jewel like pigments in overlaying and interacting as a physical and an emotive model of landscape. This evokes the tensions between natural processes and those of human action.

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By building up and stripping away these layers, the images have their own physicality and history, while gestures to the balance natural processes and human activity in the landscape - cultural reverence, exploration and exploitation, that shape landscape and our relationship to it, to form a sense of place.

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In her most recent works, the ambiguous and contradictory relationships people have with nature have become her focus, together with how the trappings of contemporary life mediate experience, attachment and valuing an environment.

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For we see the world not as it is, but as we are.

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‘The landscapes I create are reconfigured. They are part experienced and part imagined. These paintings are attempts to coalesce many twisted strands of remembering into something more substantial and essential. They are about recreating a sense of place, but also a state of mind.

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As a Theatre Designer and Scenographer, Niki Holmes works with Directors and other Production professionals to develop and manifest a shared vision, that creates sets that have a strong sense of place and a distinctive energy within which the Drama is prefigured or symbolised as it unfolds.

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Niki fuses dislocated and fragmentary elements drawn from these concerns with personal observation and reflection, to create works that balance reaching for a rational understanding with a sense of numinous knowing, to hint at pervasive resonances, the indeterminate boundaries of experience and imagination in a prescience of nature.

 

In all this, the continually unfolding process of form and thought through time is paramount, as exemplified through the notion of journey and evolution, both in the intention and execution of her work.

 

This results in a rich palimpsest, as layers of material react and flow with each other to resolve themselves as detail, strata are disrupted built up or stripping away to conceal or reveal traces of the painter's previous interventions.