Nicole Bauberger: Change Room

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Nicole Bauberger, "Change Room," 2019

Whitehorse artist Nicole Bauberger has used the dress as a motif to explore and experiment with materials for over twenty years. Over the past eight years, the dress form has moved beyond paintings to three dimensional forms. In this exhibition, she works with porcelain and glass, as well as other materials, to create ways to wonder what the shape can mean.

In doing so she has enlisted the collaboration of artists with more knowledge and experience than she has. Claire Strauss, well known for her poetic mask-based works, joined forces with Nicole to bring one of the life-size dress forms to reality. The pair created a bodice in porcelain, and devised how to give it a living skirt.

Nicole also spent awhile meeting up early in the mornings with Luann Baker, of Lumel Studios. The pair experimented with making small blown glass dresses. They also made a dress form that could hold a living plant. Just this week, they made the bowl that will complete this sculpture for gallery installation.

Nicole has made a variety of smaller dress forms in porcelain on her own, as well as cyanotypes using the transparent plastic dresses that were created as part of the “See Through” or “The Dress in the Room” installations.

She has hand-sewn a life-size dress of light plastic which will dance from a branch in a breeze. She tested an earlier version of this sculpture for her performance at “Theatre in the Bush” this past September, and has incorporated what she learned there in this new version.

Even at time of writing, Nicole isn’t exactly sure what form the exhibition will take. She thinks there will be three living plants in the gallery. Change Room offers a glimpse into fairly early stages into a creative process. You’re bound to see something you haven’t seen before.

This is one of the things Nicole values about the exhibition opportunity architect Mary Ellen Read provides at Northern Front Studio. While the work is entirely self-funded, the space also doesn’t cost the artist anything. It’s an opportunity to try things out, try them on. Artists can do almost anything there, but because Mary Ellen Read values contemporary art, concern with materials and new ideas, Nicole likes to try to make something that Mary Ellen will find wonderful, and thrives in that challenge and freedom.