Born in London in 1960, Nicola Hicks studied at Chelsea School of Art, and took her MA at the Royal College of Art. In 1982 Elizabeth Frink spotted her raw talent and predicted that she would be ‘a very great artist one day’. Twenty years on, Nicola Hicks has lived up to Frink’s expectations exhibiting widely and being given an MBE for her contribution to the visual arts.
Hicks’s practice adeptly combines discipline and skill to create sculptural works with both charming and menacing qualities. The study of anatomy and drawing is essential to her work. Although not concerned with mimetic representation her achievement is founded on a unique ability to capture the physicality and psychology of the animal and human figures she creates. Working primarily with plaster, straw and huge sheets of brown paper on which she works up her dynamic charcoal drawings, many of her sculptures have subsequently been cast in bronze, often with such subtlety that every fragile detail of plaster and straw is reproduced.