Television Alchemy

Nicola McEvoy is a transdisciplinary artist who works across mediums, including analogue/digital video, cameraless photography, textiles and ceramics. She is a graduate of the Royal College of Art (MRes Arts & Humanities) and Goldsmiths (BA Fine Art & Art History).

Her practice-based research, ‘Television Alchemy’, investigates the liquid materiality of CRT TV. Following the radical approach of chaos magicians, she is interested in how philosophy and art practice inform a path of mysticism that aims to disrupt the hegemony of capitalist realism — unveiling esoteric realities and alternative modes of being: divine, feminine, disruptive. 

Nicola is drawn to the oneiric materiality of moving image and its connection to the Great Mother archetype as the “dream screen”, a maternal psychic material that dream is projected onto. In her expanded practice, she is interested in the etymological and philosophical link between the concepts of mother and matrix (from Latin mater, mother), conceiving Great Mother archetype as the original surface upon which reality is constructed, which has since been hijacked by capitalism and its symbolic order. She posits that working in moving image accesses this region. 

Getting her first TV off the street, Nicola considers her practice to be situated within working-class consciousness, and believes that ontological insecurity within the capitalist system acts as a catalyst for an alchemical transfiguration that transforms television into a technology of mysticism and Self, a transceiver of knowledge from chaos.

With Bow Arts, Nicola is an artist educator, delivering a diverse range of workshops for children, young people and adults. She is also an assistant artist facilitator at ActionSpace, a supported studio programme for adult artists with learning disabilities.

At the thresholds of consciousness mercurial revolution takes place.

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