The Beautiful Materials gallery, founded by artist and curator Nicola Atkinson, is hosting its opening exhibition Vessels – Conversations about Materials until 6th December. Located in the Avenue Shopping Centre, Newton Mearns, the gallery displays more than a hundred paintings by Nicola, on repurposed wood panels, waiting to be viewed on a 33-metre-long shelf that runs along the gallery walls – Nicola says she didn’t want to hang the artworks on the walls; she preferred to use shelves, for their domestic association. ‘We are not museums’, she says and continues, ‘Sometimes it’s great to have a piece of work that’s immersive, but I like the idea of the intimacy. I’d like to think about people’s lives, real lives.’
Nicola is very interested in making her art part of our daily lives – she values everyday life as well as the little objects that shape it. Her debut project in Glasgow in 1993 was Lost and Found, in which she collected teaspoons and buttons from people to make her artwork.
This is one reason she likes painting vessels, but it also goes back to her art school years in Brighton in the early 80s. The act of drawing a vessel has a history for her – ‘I was at art school. I didn’t really like going to life class because I didn’t know the person. I found it a bit intense. And so, as part of my foundation, I started drawing cups.’ And she got her degree with those cups.
One question sat on my mind throughout my visit: Why is this one my favourite? The vessels draw you in and speak to your subconscious. How could anyone create a space this joyful, this playful, by drawing the same theme over and over again?
There are more than a hundred vessels in the exhibition; each one feels distinct. Some of the paintings seem like abstractions, but collectively, they form an outline of a vessel, almost like a puzzle coming together. She even chose to position some parts upside down. As an artist who enjoys an endless interaction with her viewers, she believes that we are all visually acute. ‘I never doubt anyone’s understanding or comprehension, especially the visuals,’ she states. You can see this confidence in her deliberately rough strokes – she lets us see the layers of the paintings and become part of the process. The paintings with thick layers make them feel remarkably tactile. Some of the paintings are done in one go, while others take days to dry each layer.
When it comes to Nicola’s art, everything appears simple, plain, honest, and most importantly, reachable, yet every detail tells us a story. The wood panels for the paintings were obtained from a maker during the Covid-19 pandemic. Because DIY projects got so popular during that time, the maker, who normally creates his own art, was commissioned to make weaving structures. ‘In the surroundings, there would be the points where the threads would go, and then you’d have the weaving machine. So this became just a little square, kind of a bubble. And what remained… was the waste.’ Those wastes are now exhibited on the gallery’s shelf. She uses masonry paint on them, liking the durability and industrial aspect., and interested in the fact that it is used for painting houses.
The vessels aren’t limited to wood panels. Two large-scale artworks are waiting for the viewers as well. One is a velvet, the other is layered with georgette and velvet.
In the gallery hall, there’s a model gallery of Linlithgow Burgh Halls, where she had a successful exhibition last summer. The model gallery holds 31 tiny artworks. As part of the exhibition in Linlithgow Burgh Halls, she hosted a Vessels on Loan project, allowing viewers to borrow her artworks. She aimed to let the viewers build an intimate relationship with the artwork, bringing it into their lives. That project became an important opportunity to talk about what it means to own art.
Nicola explains that her interest in scales has a lot to do with how we see things in everyday life on our phones: ‘We are seeing things smaller and smaller.’ The other reason is that, when she was working on the Linlithgow show, thinking about space, she wanted to make people slow down by showing them how small the space they were in was.
She is also interested in the idea of wearing art, which she sees as a way for the viewer to spend time with the artwork. In the gallery, a few scarves in different colours with vessel prints are on sale, and she explains that one of the reasons she prefers scarves is that their square or rectangular shapes make them the least-wasteful way to use fabric.
According to Nicola, what makes every vessel she draws different is the way she expresses her own thoughts. The cup is the same, but her own interior expression varies in how she sees, thinks, and feels that day. ‘The vessel contains my expression’, she states, and continues, ‘There’s this kind of domestic thing that we all know about vessels, so it’s a language. It seemed like a thing I could put other things behind, but it would be simply this one object.’
I asked her how she feels about having a gallery in a shopping centre, her answer was fascinating: ‘As a child, when I was quite young, I didn’t have many friends, I found it difficult to make friends and I would spend a lot of time walking up and down the high street and I made friends, all the merchants, the butcher the baker. I talked to them every day.’
That coping mechanism of a lonely child stayed with her all her life. One of her strongest qualifications as an artist is that she is very good at responding to the environment: ‘When I think about what I’m interested in as an artist, I think about that time, how I’m always interested in that kind of context to work in. I find satisfaction and joy going to new places, meeting new people. I’ve worked within the context of formal setting like shops or shopping malls or street corners. I find it very comfortable working in those contexts.’
Born in London and having lived in cities around the UK, US, and Sweden, she has nourished her ability to fit in and create in different environments. It’s not an obstacle for her, but an excitement.
Nicola has completed more than 140 temporary and permanent public art projects to date, all around the world, from Sweden to the US, Cuba to the UK. As an artist who is very interested in public art, founding The Beautiful Materials Gallery in a shopping centre was more than a coincidence. The space is provided free of charge by contemporary visual arts organisation Outer Spaces, and the aim of the gallery is ‘to reach out new audiences, and provide a clear dialogue and conversation with them about the artists and artworks.
Beautiful Materials Gallery will next host a group show, its named inspired by the festive season: PRESENT, a selection of artworks no bigger than A6, by several artists, will be on display from 13th December to 31st January 2026.
With thanks to Omur Sahin Keyif for contributing this review.
