Interview
Candace Garlock
As an artist, Candace Nicol Garlock uses an array of mediums in her work. The coalescence of printmaking techniques, painting, photography and sculpture overlap and converge with color, texture and line in a collaboration of mixed, experimental beauty. With her appreciation of the interconnectedness of everything, she elevates relationships: human and environment, human and animal, human and human. She writes, “my multilayered compositions posit engaging questions to viewers regarding relationships, social identities, and societal issues surrounding the female gaze.”
Garlock's mentorship in student advancement, both artistically and professionally, as well as her engagement and participation in community events makes her a true ambassador of art. She draws inspiration from the collaboration of those around her, through the interplay with students, and continually is organizing collaborative projects. Garlock is a member of Southern Graphics Council International and is a board member for Rocky Mountain Printmaking Alliance and Tuscarora Pottery School. A renown printmaker whose work has been shown nationally and internationally, she has received multiple awards including the Reno Tahoe Artist Best in Sculpture/3-D Artworks in 2022 and Best of Show and Best in 2D Mixed Media in 2023, the Nevada Regents’ Creative Activity Award in 2017, the Nevada Arts Council Artist Fellowship in 2009 and an honorable mention in Printmaking Today in 2008, a review of fine art printmaking in Abruzzo, Italy. Nicol’s work can also be seen in 100 Artists of the Male Figure by E.Gibbons. Her work is included in many prestigious collections including the Kinsey Institute, Zuckerman Museum of Art, Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, Nevada Arts Council, and National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.
What is your background and how did you start your journey in the art world?
“I’m an artist working in Reno, Nevada in the United States. I grew up in rural Nevada, an environment of contradictions. At home our familial bodies were objects of concealment, masses of possible shame that we hid from ourselves and each other. Our bodies - the flesh and substance of our beings - were not open for discussion or discovery. Yet in public, especially the casinos where we often dined, scantly clad bodies - mostly women, were familiar territory, open to the public gaze. My parents did not acknowledge this contrast or help us understand the mixed messages, hoping that the issues of nudity in Nevada would be invisible. This formation led to a certain naïveté and curiosity, but also a deep fear of the body. I was an ‘artist in the making’ during the 1980’s and 1990’s when artists were vulnerable to the United States culture wars - a time where conservative politicians began to aggressively attack public arts funding. The consequences of the 1970’s sexual revolution - rising divorce rates, the growing numbers of working moms, and demands for gay rights - helped define the conservative backlash of the 1980’s. Artists began to rethink and reshape subject-positions and the darker side of ‘self’ seemed to be even more clearly and strongly expressed. This has been a lasting thread throughout my work.”
What inspires you?
“Everything and anything, I imagine. Really. I’m a curious person and love learning. I love sharing my knowledge and art techniques with others. I love collaborating. I love challenges. I feel like it’s all connected. In my complex prints, figures and ideas float across vistas, and etchings hover in front of subjects and ideas, reminding us that a place is often in our heads. I use constant mediated landscapes of advertisements, TV and movie stills, images from the internet to narrate our shared experiences and blend to inform our understanding of the world around us. I use fragmentation to represent memory and place which is layered and disjointed and always influenced by outside forces.”
What themes do you pursue? Is there an underlying message in your work?
“I wrote an essay that probably explains my themes best, but for this interview I would just like to focus on the work done since 2019.
By 2019, it was clear to me that I was struggling more with my MS symptoms and that the flow between the brain and my hands was extremely difficult. It was also at this time that I decided to go back to ceramics. I wanted to explore more about what was happening to my brain, living with Multiple Sclerosis, the gaps in memory and the need for a slower thought process. Ideas are jumbled and sometimes overwhelming until my mind is rested. And yes, the pain - like little ants biting my muscles and long hooks pulling me in a direction I didn't really want to go towards. I wanted the viewer to visually experience how it might be to travel through my mind, through mapping, transposition, image barriers, reflection and narrative. I started to use the power of sculpture and mixed media in order to achieve visually what I couldn’t really define verbally. The sculptures themselves are completely abstracted non-specific gendered bodies. The limbs are metaphors of pain, stripped skin showing nerves and tendons. Hands and feet are non-existent. There are only flowers with puddles of blood in their place. By 2023, the body as seen in Sensory Disruption, is further abstracted as a flowing, bulbous form supporting the nervous system which has also become nodes of blooming blood flowers. I’m thinking that the most important message coming from my work is that the ‘personal’ is powerful way to communicate, to show vulnerability and that we are all connected on that level is we just allow ourselves to open up.”
How would you describe your work?
“I use variety of printmaking techniques, painting, photography overlapping with lots of texture and line(s) in a collaboration of mixed, experimental beauty. I appreciate the interconnectedness of everything, exploring relationships between human and the environment, human and animal, human and human.”
Which artists influence you most?
“First artist – Ida Applebroog. I feel like I read the book ‘Are You Bleeding Yet’ so many times. A lot of my fragmented narrative assemblages from the early 2000s were heavily influenced by her. The second artist - Frida Kahlo. Her work is so honest, open, and brave. Perhaps, I appreciate her now more that I am older and have experienced a lot of chronic pain. Besides that, I grew up in a household that valued secrets. My grandma’s generation would have been abhorred at the thought of me creating art about my illness. Well, to be honest, many older family members were upset about my artwork even in my early years as an artist. I have always pushed boundaries a bit since the early 1990’s. The questions I’ve raised and the themes that I have explored invariably have traveled down the path of revealing secrets, taboos, and the complexities of relationships, so it wasn’t hard for me to open up about having MS.”
“I use variety of printmaking techniques, painting, photography overlapping with lots of texture and line(s) in a collaboration of mixed, experimental beauty.”
What is your creative process like?
“Living with MS - it’s there in the background all the time. I try to respect it and balance making art, spending time with family, and working with lots of rest. It does limit my productive time and I do not produce the amount of artwork that I did before MS. I think the public acknowledgment of it has empowered me. I am such a strong advocate for openness about our illnesses and struggles. One aspect of my creative process that is so important and is something I feel everyone should embrace is the use of the journal. I’ve always had a sketchbook but it was separated from my every day, my family, my work, etc. After my first MS attack in 2011, my neurologist was helping me come up with strategies to work through the healing process. She mentioned journaling to help with memory. I immediately became obsessed with it, combining my writing and art into the art journal. I began to learn how to make art journal books and then started teaching how to make them in my classes at TMCC. The art journals were also memory books that infused my family life with my art. The two became one and I couldn’t separate any of it. When I had my second attack in 2023, one of the skills I lost was my drawing ability. It’s a little humorous at this moment, thinking about my priorities. I had to practice walking again and speaking. Of course, thinking was a problem, and I was fighting fatigue, but what I was the most concerned about was my inability to draw. One night in June, I just began to draw for an hour using ink pens, and then the next morning I would take a picture of the drawing and color the drawing in Photoshop. I was getting my Photoshop skills back, too. I then wrote about the drawing. At first, the Daily Nodes were an exercise, but as I continued, I realized that what I was experiencing was more than just about physical healing, it was also a mental journey towards that part of healing that is so hard for us all. The healing of the mind and soul.”
What is an artist’s role in society and how do you see that evolving?
“I feel that we as artists hold these little magnifying glasses that show up close what society is really like. I think we need to be the brave ones, to confront inequities through our art. I think we also need to teach others how to be creative, how to heal through art making, and how to communicate in a different way.”
Have you had any noteworthy exhibitions you'd like to share?
“My most recent exhibition, ‘Grid-Body-Place,’ John & Geraldine Lilley Museum of Art, is a small retrospective about the body: how we look at it, how we perceive and feel it, and how our bodies both teach and betray us. Stephanie Gibson, the curator wrote: ‘This exhibition features heaps of playful feet, the taboo subject of the male nude, the inner workings of a nervous system that has betrayed the artist's body. I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS), a long-lasting and chronic disease of the central nervous system, in 2011. After that, the artist began interpreting her own body in her work, in drawings, etchings, and sculptures, all illustrating the different ways the body tells the story. This exhibition is not chronological, but it traces the practice of an artist who takes us on a journey through body and mind, with fragments of memory, our senses and reflections, mapped onto paper and clay.’”
Website: candacenicolgarlock.com
Instagram: @candacegarlock
