Painting & Printmaking School of Fine Art
Rebecca Niska

The basis of my art practice is to intertwine the relationship of hard and soft elements that we encounter in our daily life through architecture, nature and emotions. These topics are composed structurally, whilst also subconsciously drawn from the shapes and colours of our surroundings. The outcome is three dimensional work that stretches between the physical and the pictorial. In my practice I am constantly playing with the power of display as well as how my installations can be tied in with the attributes of the space.
The material I use in my work plays just as an important part as the medium. This is highlighted through investigations of coalescing of objects with organic materials such as clay, wood and metal. My practice is very driven by notions of happenstance and a curiosity of these materials clashing and coming together to create work that plays with illusions of mass, gravity and structures. It is a constant dialogue between the state of the raw materials as well as how these materials can be manipulated and worked into, in relation to their characteristics. Recently I have mainly been working with wood and learning about the craft and handling of this material in its many forms.
The recent focus of my work has been to look closely at details of construction sites and random objects that map our passages around Glasgow and constantly changing our pathways. The way the materials in these sites have been stacked, leaned or left out before being put into their intended usage, has impacted my work visually. In a similar notion I aim to play with the bodily movement of the viewer through out my displays and most of my works are installed in a state of balance, fragility and tension. The main approach for my material use is to construct my work around scrap materials to bring awareness of material wastage and how found objects can be recycled and redefined in artefacts
