NICOLE BENO is a Canadian artist and designer. She is known for creating colourful, saturated digital artworks by scanning, collaging and distorting images into something entirely new. Her work transforms natural materials and found objects through the process of digital manipulation, resulting in an engaging and visually tactile hybrid of the digital and analog. This process culminates in the creation of visual worlds and utopias, challenging the idea of artificiality and perception.
Nicole has been spending the summer working in the studio on explorations and personal projects, building out a new body of work. Playing a lot with digital textile design and screenprinting.
We had the chance to ask Nicole Beno some questions about her practice to figure out how she works.
Your website has a collection of what you call Visual Research. We love peeking into literal snapshots of what inspires you! Why was it important to you to create a public collection of inspiration/references?
"It’s mostly a place where I have unfinished ideas, tidbits of something interesting but not completely resolved yet.. I guess in a way it’s a place where I mostly just play around and explore things without having a client brief, or without a commercial project contract. Some of the projects here have gone into a graveyard folder or something on my computer, because they didn’t find a place elsewhere. The projects are more free and can be whatever they want to be. I also collect things that have inspired me from travels, like I have an obsession with exploring post-communist building structures and architectural details when I go see my family in Slovakia. I wish I could expand on my research section more and spend more time exploring one particular thing, I feel like I’m always jumping around."
How does your experience as a graphic designer influence or inform your practice as an artist?
"I think it’s how I work with images and create compositions. I tend to layer and mix in a lot of graphical elements and pieces with photography and textures. I also use the same computer programs that I use as a graphic designer to create artwork. In my arts practice, I’m interested in using these tools incorrectly. I’m more fascinated with the unexpected moments or mistakes that I make when using the tools the wrong way, like in Photoshop I use this one tool repeatedly to layer things on top of – and it’s definitely not the way it’s supposed to be used!"
"In a way my relationship with working as a graphic designer becomes a rhetorical device I use in my arts practice and I use it as a way to bring meaning into my work, such as commenting on consumption and globalization."
Your work mixes analog and digital methods of art making in beautiful and thoughtful ways. What is your thought process while mixing these methods, and how do you think it impacts the overall experience of the viewer engaging with your art?
"Oh thank you – it’s always a work in progress. I’m interested in how I can make the hand visible in my computer generated work – like how I can show the imperfections, textures – almost like resisting the flatness of the computer. When creating these digital/analog compositions, I tend to create a visual world that displays a version of reality that doesn’t actually exist, a surface that can be seen but not felt that’s caught somewhere in between the computer and the hand – the digital and the analog. I like when the viewer isn’t quite sure what’s fully going on in the artwork, but understands bits and pieces that draw them in..I hope that this makes the work more engaging and adds more depth to the work."
What is your experience like in the art community scene?
"I really enjoy collaborating with other artists in the city and creating self initiated projects that come out of a random night at the studio together, or applying for public art projects. This year has been hard with the pandemic though, and I think that’s slowed down the momentum a bit and I’ve had more time to reflect. Since I also work as a graphic designer, I find I sometimes feel like an imposter – like I’m not a real artist! I’m just faking it – so I also have to get over this fear, and find ways to leverage my graphic design background more in the arts community."
Is play/experimentation an important part of your process? Why/why not?
"Definitely. It’s the curiosities that fuel my work and get me excited. Especially since a lot of my day job is spent creating visuals that have a more direct purpose or a specific function or goal. Sometimes a project or an idea starts by tinkering and having a hunch about something, instead of having an idea fully fleshed out. I’m a very hands on person and I need to try things to understand how things work, so for me play and experimentation are essential and I think through the process of making."
What is your favourite part about screenprinting? For folks who aren’t familiar with the process, can you explain how it works?
"Screen printing is a technique where you basically push ink through a mesh screen to expose a design. I first discovered it during school and I was attracted to the fact that the printing method allows you to get these really bold, saturated colours, and the layers are tactile, like you can see the ink on paper. I also really liked that I could expose my own designs that I would first create on the computer, so it was this happy medium – both the tactility and the control of the design made this technique very appealing."
"What I love the most about screen printing now is the connection to the body and the movement the process requires. It can be very labour intensive! Since I compose a lot of the artwork on the computer, the screenprinting side of my practice is a way to get more physically involved on the artwork side. I also find that there is more room for error during this process and I kind of like that – I like that you can’t easily undo a layer, or sometimes you get some really cool accidental marks that happen."
Your work holds a lot of colour. What are some decisions that you’re making when you decide which colours to use, and how many layers?
"Oh I wish I could understand my decision making process.. I think it’s more intuitive honestly.. Like I do think there is a point in an artwork when you know it’s done, it’s this sort of feeling, but sometimes things can go on for days of just playing and pushing pieces around. For colour, I like it when there are a few colours that don’t belong, like that aren’t supposed to be there that interrupt the palette."
"I wish I could keep things more simple, I don’t know why my intuitive senses always tell me more is more and I obsessively layer on haha."
Walk us through your creative process. How do you typically start/end a project?
"I’m not very good at having a specific process that I always use, I think it changes all the time based on the work that I’m doing. Mostly though I try to start with a loose sketch or jot down a bunch of thoughts or ideas in my notebook that drive the foundations of the artwork. Then I collect a bunch of materials that I want to use as my content/sources of imagery for the piece. I visit a lot of used books stores for collage content that I then manipulate on the computer. The scanner is a big part of my process and a way I input a lot of my content, such as dried flora and fauna, interesting textures and photography."
If you could be any art material or tool, what would you be and why?
"Undo tool – sometimes I wish I could undo silly things I do, but I guess then life wouldn’t be as interesting…"
What are you most excited about for your art practice moving forward?
"Playing with more movement and sound. Working at a larger scale, and bringing the artwork into the physical world. Instagram can be good for promoting artwork, but it’s not great for capturing the experience of it. In real life I want to be able to step into the worlds that I digitally create and see what they feel like!"
If you like Nicole's work, check out the links below!