Introduction

There is a painting that five generations of Nancy Nicholson’s family have grown up against. A landscape of Cumbrian farmland in colours that the rug-weaver and textile artist describes as “quite earthy and muddy, but with underlying jewel-tones”. Dark red and smoky blue. Born from sketches made on one productive afternoon decades ago by her great-grandmother, the painting was of the view from the room her grandfather was born in. It then hung in Nicholson’s parents bedroom when she was little, and now it hangs on the wall of the room she sleeps in with her husband and child. As we speak, her infant daughter Dot is lying on her, and, Nicholson tells me, “there is a definite similarity in the lines of Dot and the shapes in the painting.” It is the starting point, she says, when prompted to think about making work inspired by home. The colour palette from the painting flows into paint colours and textiles that surround her in the home she has now made in Devon. “It’s almost like a go-to,” she says. “It’s a point of safety, but also a reach back into my childhood.

Nicholson worked as a set designer for the stage before she worked in galleries and became a rug-weaver full-time. The intersection between the land, what we can grow from it and how we use it in our homes has long been part of her life: she grew up on a farm in Cumbria that reared sheep for their wool and meat, and that wool is now woven - quite literally - into her work. Perhaps this is why Nicholson’s pieces seem as much borne of the outdoor world around us as of human hand: invitingly textured, grounded in their colour and form but of such careful refinement that they beg the time to linger and appreciate. Not unlike the raw heights of the Lake District.