Bio
Jane Nicol b. 1949
Jane Nicol knows she was born in Helensburgh, Scotland in 1949. She knows she was raised by her matriachal extended family and her solo mother, a teacher who had served in the Royal Observer Corps as a teenager in WWII. She knows she was accepted into the prestigious Gray’s School of Art at the young age of 16 where she studied in 3 dimensional mediums and chose to major in sculpture. She doesn’t remember the smell of her mother’s perfume. She doesn’t remember what clay feels like in her hands.
She knows that she married and moved to New Zealand in 1975, where she practiced successfully as a sculptor while farming 1700acres of remote hill country in Marlborough in partnership with her husband. She knows she was an intelligent, award winning fashion designer, mother of two, managing director of three companies, and a successful practicing psychotherapist with a strong sense of purpose and achievement. She doesn’t remember what the sun feels like on her back. She doesn’t remember what it felt like to hold her children as babies in her arms.
She knows that on November 22nd 2003 she injured her left foot in a minor accident. She knows that, during subsequent medical treatment, in early 2004 she suffered an injury to her brain that compromised life as she knew it irrevocably.
Jane knows where she came from. That is a matter of fact. She no longer knows who she is. She no longer knows what she is “for”. This makes any contemplation of how she might describe herself as an artist a difficult and disillusioning task.
Her background in esoteric studies and post-graduate training in Sensorimotor and Trauma Psychotherapy might have established a parameter in which she could re-orient herself, if only she had the ability to construct a cognitive or meditative dialogue within herself. Without the ability for her mind to talk over the intense physiological symptoms and perceptual distortions her brain injury presents she is unable to interface with the resources she had in her life prior to the experience with the drug.
With the experience of breakthrough EEG Neurofeedback treatment she is learning to process the world in a new and profoundly different way. Drawn, for the first time in her life, to expression in 2 dimensions, in mid 2004 her daughter, artist Alex Bacskay (www.bacskay.net), handed her a paint brush for therapy. The result was nothing short of extraordinary. Jane did not learn how to paint. She does not remember having painted. For her the paintings just seem to arrive. Although it is obvious from the spontaneously high level of technical skill that, as she says, “it seems, somebody knows how to paint?” she herself is as astounded at the outcome of each work as any first time viewer.
For Jane painting is not simply an action, it is a location. Her paintings are fragments of reality, contextually dissociated. She paints from an understanding of what it truly means to be estranged from experiencing even the most simple familiarity with this physical reality in which we are all complacent.