ARTIST STATEMENT
I make soft sculptures and wall works out of an urgency to understand experiences that are difficult to explain in words. I am interested less in recreating how a moment looked than in giving physical form to how it felt.
I return to emotionally charged moments between people, where contradictory feelings can exist at once: intimacy and fear, belonging and estrangement, holding on and letting go. Maternal forms, swimmers, grouped women, and veiled figures recur as ways of approaching experiences and relationships I am still trying to understand.
I work primarily with hand-dyed cheesecloth, pigment, acrylic, canvas, and steel. I wrap, bind, braid, gather, veil, and accumulate the material, building mass from something soft, porous, and nearly weightless. Its ability to obscure, connect, contain, and transform allows boundaries between bodies, figures, and environments to remain uncertain.
I am not trying to resolve these experiences. I want the work to make room for opposing truths to remain present at once - and to offer the recognition of encountering something difficult to name and thinking, I know that feeling too.
ARTIST BIO
Margaret Nicoll is a multidisciplinary artist whose soft sculptures and wall works explore the paradox of resilience and fragility through fiber, form, and color. Working primarily with hand-dyed fiber, pigment, and steel armature, she transforms delicate, everyday materials into monumental, tactile studies of endurance, connection, and emotional repair.
Her work examines the quiet complexity of our inner lives - maternal protection and inherited patterns, exhaustion and burnout, resilience and self-sufficiency - while reflecting universal human experiences.
During her formative years, she was deeply influenced and encouraged by Sol LeWitt, whom she had the privilege of working for as an installation assistant at The Mercy Gallery. Margaret also worked as an assistant to Art Consultant Jean Efron, who built blue chip collections for institutions in Washington, DC, before moving to San Francisco and working as an installation assistant for Sharon Virtue at The DeYoung Museum.
Margaret earned this chapter of full artistic focus after two entrepreneurial decades spent building a creative life to sustain herself and her family. Through her marketing agency, MAKA Digital, she led strategy and creative campaigns for global brands, channeling her artistic instincts into storytelling and design. That experience shaped her enduring fascination with how form, feeling, and communication converge - a curiosity now channeled through material and gesture rather than pixels and words.
After living and working across the world, Margaret returned home to Vermont, where she lives and works surrounded by her family, dogs, chickens, and bees.