June nikol

I make visual and ceramic art grappling the depths of fear, grief, and how we maintain embodiment throughout these human states. Through my art, I explore how the mundane and unbearable can coexist with beauty, play, and magic.

Creating, mending, tinkering, and a curiosity to understand the human experience is what continues to tether me to connection in its most potent form. What satisfies our need to connect with our child selves in order to be connected to our current selves? How do we become adults, have a livelihood, have passions not tied to commodity culture, provide basic necessities during a time where time theft is rampant, build our communities, and remain in contact with ourselves?

My Neurodivergent & Queer lens greatly informs how I interact with myself, this world, and how I make sense of existence. I find the modern world to be excruciating. Creating anything out of raw/found materials while cocooned in my little studio apartment made up of brick and rusty metal pipes and vines creeping in through the windows, brings me relief, as it seems I can travel to where time doesn’t exist when I'm inside my brain and my brain is inside of a building over 100 years old.

My work is not work, it is my outlet. My work is not my main livelihood and I think I want to keep it that way. I exist in a triangle floating in the vast skies of the gig economy, I feel my most free to explore my brain and my heart when I’m saying yes to driving a stranger across the country for money or doing a random study to pay my rent. In these late stages of capitalism I’m really asking myself what I actually want to do, and I do choose to be financially insecure yet have the space to think and love and relate to the world how I want. The lifelong goal is the journey, I never want to be uncertain of who I am because of a job, I want to learn about who I am through as many novel, safe experiences I can have.

Alchemizing my creativity into objects that exist in the physical realm is just about the most intoxicating feeling I’ve come across in this life. Actively fighting technology led human erasure feels like the only option we have to reclaim any sense of sanity or pleasure we’ve lost at the hands of the oppressive societies we’ve created. What an honor it is to resist.