Founder's Review

Founder’s Review: Nicola Anthony — Sculpting the Human Story Across Time

 

In this powerful Explore Art feature, Nicola Anthony's practice emerges as a profound and contemporary meditation on human evolution—biologically, socially, and spiritually. Her sculptures are not merely objects of artistic expression; they are living archives of who we are, how we remember, and how we evolve. With deep intellectual rigor, she draws from evolutionary biology, horology, and anthropology to reveal that human identity is not static but an ever-shifting continuum shaped by our ancestors, our communities, and the global currents that carry our stories forward.

 

Anthony’s fascination with language and memory—spoken, written, silenced, and forgotten—forms the backbone of her sculptural voice. She transforms testimonies and fragmented histories into monumental steel text sculptures, burning paper works, and light-based installations that feel suspended in time. Through these mediums, she traces the intimate clockwork of human experience: the beat of ancestral trauma in our DNA, the rhythm of migration, the collective pulse of communities searching for belonging, and the global choreography of emergent behavior that connects people, ideas, and hopes like constellations across the world.

 

What makes Anthony’s work exceptional is her ability to bridge the personal and the cosmic. She honors the internal “archives” that live within every individual—the inherited memories, the stories whispered across generations—and places them into dialogue with the universal forces that shape humanity. Her research into epigenetics and transgenerational trauma underscores a truth we often feel but struggle to articulate: we evolve not just through time, but through each other. Our identities are sculpted by family circles, expanded by community, tested by society, and refined by our shared global human experience.

 

Standing before Anthony’s work, one senses both the weight and fragility of collective memory. Her sculptures hold language up to the light, revealing its power to heal, to preserve, and at times, to protect those whose voices history has tried to erase. In a world wrestling with displacement, division, and rapid transformation, her art becomes a compass—pointing us back to empathy, truth-seeking, and the unshakeable connection between all human stories.

 

Nicola Anthony doesn’t simply sculpt text or form; she sculpts time, ancestry, and the invisible threads that bind us. Through her practice, we are reminded that evolution is not only a matter of biology—it is a lifelong communal act of remembering, adapting, and rising together.

 

Living Artfully,

Renée L. Rose

Founder/Explore Art

Chicago, Illinois