Nina Royle (b. 1986) lives and works in Cornwall, UK. Royle holds an MA in Fine Art from the Slade School of Painting and has been exhibiting extensively since graduating in 2016.
Royle’s hand sculpted painted panels are individual expressions of landscape, weather, corporeality and time – they encompass a direct, material encounter with the physical world. The work can also be read as articulations of the constantly evolving painting process - fluid, fleeting and subject to change. Royle’s work conveys observations of the small and subjective, sitting within and making the vast; a sense of uncontrollable movement and growth and tensions between ephemerality and permanence in the everyday.
Royle’s practice includes painting, creative writing and performance. Her most recent bodies of work have focused on weaving these different modes of expression together, to form fragmented meditations on nature’s nature and how we as humans position ourselves in relation to it; framing nature as it courses through and make us. Present in all her work is an aim to describe direct, material encounters with the physical world, coupled with an impression that these same encounters are fluid and fleeting.
Her paintings are on shaped wood panels coated in gesso made from rabbit skin glue and whiting. Typically small in scale, portable and haptic, the paintings privilege the hand as much as the eye. Embedded in the work is an interest in colour and material acting as both a substance and a sign. The pigments, dyes and other materials used in her work, are therefore often selected for their symbolic value and conversation stimulated on connections between human language and the physical world.
Recent solo and group exhibitions include: ‘Hospital Rooms’ commission to create an artwork for a mothers and babies psychiatric ward, Exeter, UK (2019); ‘The World as yet Unseen: Female Artists in coverstaion with Partou Zia’ group show curated by Dr. Penny Florence. Falmouth Art Gallery, Cornwall, UK (2019);‘Global Cows’ collaborative project, Damien and the Love Guru, Brussels, Belgium (2019); ‘Glaucous’ Performance commissioned by Tate St Ives for Late at Tate. Cornwall, Uk (2018); ‘Forced Collaboration’, online platform matching artists’ practices (2018);‘Where it is, There it is’ group show,Groundwork program, Auction House, Cornwall, UK (2018); ‘In the Manor of Smoke’, group show, Alice Black, London UK (2018); ‘Lexis Over Land: Towards a Feminist Geography’ Group show, curated by Nina Royle, Tremenheere Sculpture Garden, Cornwall, UK (2017); ‘Crying in the Neck’ Collaboration (performance and exhibition), NICC, Brussels, Belgium(2017);‘Thalassic Trace,’ solo show, The Picture Room, Newlyn Art Gallery Cornwall, UK (2017); ‘Visceral’ group show, Coates and Scarry, London (2017); ‘Homemade’ group show, Newlyn Exchange, Cornwall, UK (2016).
