source of inspiration

Written By Candace Garlock

At the time that I was starting to exhibit “Never out of the Woods” installation (images in support materials), I was also organizing a regional collaboration, The The Honeycomb Project, a collection of 900 art panels created by 500 participants from 14 states, that explores the metaphor of the honeycomb, highlighting themes of interconnectedness, collaboration, and community strength. The collection of work is being shown in 11 venues within the next 3 years. The power of sharing one another’s stories and making art together led me to the collaboration idea of “We Know This Forest,” When I began to talk about the idea at a couple of the exhibits (The Davis Gallery in Geneva, NY and Truckee Meadows Community College in Reno, NV), viewers were excited about the prospect and encouraged me start the planning process.

Candace Garlock Artist Statement:

I feel like I’m tracing a shifting relationship with the body, beginning with the charged space of moving into the intimate terrain of illness, sensation, and repair. Working across printmaking, sculpture, installation, and drawing, my work has become a way to inhabit a body that is constantly being rewired, to make visible the psychic and physical negotiations that chronic illness demands.

Installation has become a way to extend this internal experience, creating environments that one must physically navigate, much as illness forces me to navigate an altered reality. In the installation at the heart of MS Narrative “Never out of the Woods”, disembodied feet, vessels of viscous red-orange resin, and suspended upside-down trees woodcut prints on paper are arranged as a dysfunctional communication network. The viewer encounters fragments—limbs, paper, shadows—connected yet unable to fully “speak” to one another, echoing the misfiring signals of a damaged nervous system. The fluttering paper forms entice the viewer to walk through the forest, implicating their own body in this broken circuit and asking them to feel, even briefly, the disorientation of living inside an unreliable architecture.

To see more of Candace Nicol Garlock’s work, visit her website: candacenicolgarlock.com

Candace Garlock

As an artist, Candace Nicol Garlock uses an array of mediums in her work. The coalescence of printmaking techniques, painting, photography (and sculpture, too!) overlap and converge with color, texture and line in a collaboration of mixed, experimental beauty. With her appreciation of the interconnectedness of everything, she elevates relationships: human and environment, human and animal, human and human. She writes, “my multilayered compositions posit engaging questions to viewers regarding relationships, social identities, and societal issues surrounding the female gaze.”

Garlock's mentorship in student advancement, both artistically and professionally, as well as her engagement and participation in community events makes her a true ambassador of art. She draws inspiration from the collaboration of those around her, through the interplay with students, and continually is organizing collaborative projects. A renown printmaker whose work has been shown nationally and internationally, she has received multiple awards including the Reno Tahoe Artist Best in Sculpture/3-D Artworks in 2022, Best of Show and Best in 2D Mixed Media in 2023 and Best in 2-D Artworks in 2024, the Nevada Regents’ Creative Activity Award in 2017, the Nevada Arts Council Artist Fellowship in 2009 and an honorable mention in Printmaking Today in 2008, a review of fine art printmaking in Abruzzo, Italy. Nicol’s work can also be seen in 100 Artists of the Male Figure by E.Gibbons. Her work is included in many prestigious collections including the Kinsey Institute, Zuckerman Museum of Art, Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, Nevada Arts Council, and National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.

https://candacenicolgarlock.com
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