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STEP 28 | Yellow Brick Variations

with Claire Nichols14/03/21, 06/05/2025 Steps Upcoming

Claire Nichols will experiment with integrating two key practices into her live performance work: her sound and somatic practices. She will explore ways of listening and connecting to our environment in a broader sense, merging her field recording work, her movement improvisation and her awareness practice as an Alexander Technique teacher.
Whilst in residence at Yellow Brick, Nichols will research and develop sonic encounters within public space in Athens. She will create a layered soundtrack composed of field recordings she makes in the city, which will form the backdrop for live sonic and somatic interventions and improvisations. She will investigate how the live environment in which her intervention is encountered can become part of its resonant field, as well as how this experience can transform through work with expanded awareness, breath and movement.
Nichols is interested in reaching new audiences through her work. During her residency, she will test how she might extend her practice through exploring workshop formats and modes of audience interaction.



Images:

  1. Hangar Variations (2021), installation view, live performance
  2. Maus Hábitos Variations (2023), detail view, live performance
  3. Ecole des Sables Variations (2022), performance still

is a London-based artist working with performance and sculpture.

She has been developing Variations, a series of audio-visual performances, since 2017. She creates live drawings in space with materials that are often formless, sometimes dispersing sawdust and flour into closed spaces, or using lights and mirrors to make improvised shadow formations. These constellations are triggered by a musical score in a live performance.

Through her Variations series, she works with improvisation and live performance, exploring how these modes can offer meeting points between the fields of sculpture, movement and sound. These forms and disciplines unite to become hybrid performances in process.

Nichols’ Variations series has been recognised via the Barbican Arts group Trust Main Prize Award, selected by Florence Peake and Tai Shani in 2018, and the PLÁKA Porto Award in 2023. The series has been exhibited at galleries including Florence Trust and Arebyte, London; Space 118, Mumbai; Hangar, Barcelona; and Maus Hábitos, Porto.

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