Nicole Bauberger
"...I crouch between the toes of the earth,
swept by the hem of this sky's skirt."
from "Horizon tells," - Urban Coyote
The horizon draws me to the Yukon. I can almost hear the conversation going on between these dynamic skies and strong wide mountains. That conversation is what I try to paint.
For 22 years - since I was 10 - I lived in Peterborough, Ontario. Although I took a couple of valuable courses at the Ontario College of Art, I chose my Peterborough collaborations as my art college. For five years I worked as apprentice and assistant painter to David Bierk - an intensive education in oil paint, methods and materials, as well as art history and contemporary art practice. Late at night in the BierkArt Studio I began my first experiments with encaustic, using the hotplate we used to make the rabbit skin glue.
Since leaving BierkArt in the spring of 1999 I have pursued my own artistic visions. I created a show of paintings and drawings in installation, which stages a dialogue with Baroque painter Artemesia Gentileschi, and toured it across Canada. I invented a mural project based on a more empowering version of my apprenticeship and led young people through that adventure in Ontario High Schools and many other places. I continued my investigations of light, colour, paint, place, word and movement through many art projects, solo and collaborative, as object, print and performance.
And after three summers of painting in the Yukon I made it my home. I’m still painting that dialogue between the land and the sky.