In Seven Days... Studio Process

After her numerous trips to the US on Obama’s 2008 Presidential Campaign, Nicola Green amassed a huge archive of sketches and photographs, as well as newspapers, magazines and paraphernalia. She deliberated for months, working out how to distil the contents of this substantial collection of primary materials and visual research into artworks. She painstakingly examined every item, selecting only the most important pieces that reflected her unique perspective on the campaign.

These materials were then gradually combined with her years of academic research analysing the campaign and its global effect in all its complexities. Green considered the most significant moments including the highs and the lows; Obama’s meteoric ascent from relative obscurity to the highest office in the land, from ‘invisible’ man to the most ‘visible’ man on the planet that everyone was watching. Green absorbed Obama’s story, including his family, his champions and critics, and his struggle with identity. She spent countless hours learning more about the history, culture, and politics of the United States, the global history of race, as well as all of those who came before to pave the way for the Obama Presidency and its legacy. These themes were viewed through the lens of the world beyond America and her own family’s complex mixed heritage story.

After years of work, frequently in almost monastic silence, Green produced a series of seven Development Works. These seven artworks each contain a selection of artworks, archival material and visual research, carefully curated to expose the most powerful and pure symbols from the mass of material, and to construct a thematic narrative telling an inspiring visual story. Green’s Development Works are of aesthetic value as well as historical and social importance. Alongside this process Green forensically categorised her research, archiving every object both physically and digitally, whilst making and curating additional written, audio and visual materials to accompany it.

This visual archive contained the story Green wanted to tell, but she still needed to work out how to communicate this visually. Green understood that she must find new and unique ways to make sense of this story, to uncover its most essential meaning and form, and ensure its themes could continue to be explored and understood for generations to come. 

The artist began her process at the London Printworks Trust, an institution uniquely experienced in hand printing textiles. Here she used vast silk screens on endlessly long tables, printing onto reams of paper. She began by isolating elements from her many sketches and photographs, projecting and printing the sectioned images at speed with the goal of exposing the most powerful and pure symbols from this mass of material.

Through the process of pushing ink through the screens again and again, it became clear which elements conveyed meaning, and which could be discarded. By using the screens as a drawing tool Green pushed the boundaries of her materials; overlaying icons, multiplying them, reducing them: testing the limits of negative space, pattern and repetition. Green unsentimentally experimented with their form and colour, exposing the most essential gestures and symbols. Through these relentless processes, Green’s abstractions minimised line whilst still maintaining critical form. Through this practice, meaning was layered into every inch of the deceptively simple imagery. Most of the artworks produced during these developmental stages were destroyed, but Green kept the pieces which were successful as artworks in their own right.

A second editions was printed at Axelle Fine Arts in Brooklyn New York.

After years of development, Green located and refined this imagery and began making the first large scale artworks at the London Print Studio in Harrow Road. These were the very first iterations of In Seven Days…

The works were Green’s first experience working with the printed images at this large scale, which she felt integral to making space for the monumental themes of the story. Printing such expanses of flat planes of colour at this size and scale is extremely rare, mostly because of the high risk and technical difficulties. The artist experimented with multiple colour palettes, mixing and printing over and over again, returning to each until she found the perfect pigment and tone. Curators have noted the size of these expanses of colour as unusual, particlarly combined with hand-applied 24k gold leaf and complex print-making challenges. This is likely due to the artist having trained and worked for years as an oil painter, bringing these stylistic techniques, processes and practises to her silkscreen printing process.