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June 8, 2025 to January 11, 2026 In the Galleries

Nickola Pottinger: fos born

A lot of my work materializes in the process of making, and from there, there is a channeling that occurs.[1] – Nickola Pottinger

Nickola Pottinger’s practice spans drawing, collage, and sculpture. Her objects often appear in the round, on the wall, or sometimes within tableaux. She refers to her sculptural works as “duppies” (Jamaican patois for ghosts) in reverence to her Jamaican ancestry and the West Indian community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn where she was raised and still resides today. Composed out of recovered heirlooms, excavated and recycled materials, Pottinger creates pigmented paper pulp from family documents, past artworks, and rubble using a handheld kitchen mixer. Akin to clay or concrete and imbued with memories of her family lineage as well as folklore heard as a child, she embellishes her mystical creations, which sometimes manifest as protectors, couriers or even spirits of the deceased, with oil pastel and watercolor, casts of her hands and face, teeth, gilded Yagua leaf, lava rocks, Bantu hair knots and more. Her titles often reference their origins, places, memories, and adages specific to Jamaica. Sliding between figure and object, with references to her body, as maker and matter, her “duppies” resemble fantastical presences, spiritual talisman, and anthropomorphized furniture, with narratives fueled by dreams, actuality, and something in-between.

This exhibition marks the artist’s solo museum debut. It will unveil a new body of work made specifically for the show. It will be accompanied by Pottinger’s first museum publication with an essay by the curator. This exhibition is curated by Amy Smith-Stewart, Chief Curator.

Nickola Pottinger was born in 1986 in Kingston, Jamaica and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union in 2008. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the New Museum, NY, Swivel Gallery, Brooklyn, Chapter NY, Sargent’s Daughters, NY, Deanna Evans Project, NY, Galerie Julien Cadet, Paris, Mrs. Gallery, Queens, and Jenkins Johnson Gallery, NY, among many others.


1. Logan Royce Breitman, “Conjuring Spirits and The Spirit of Art with Nickola Pottinger,” Interlocutor Magazine, February 28, 2024, https://interlocutorinterviews...

Artworks

Sculptures in cream, brown, neutral, and green tones in a museum gallery with white walls and wooden floors.
Sculptures in cream, brown, neutral, and green tones in a museum gallery with white walls and wooden floors.
Sculptures in cream, brown, neutral, and green tones in a museum gallery with white walls and wooden floors.
A green and brown sculptural art work of an abstract creature with two pregnant human torsos, a face, and hands and feet.
Sculptural white artwork with hands and feet on an abstract figure with scripted writing on its front side with a bone cross atop.
White, black, and gold sculptural artwork of two abstract figures.
Brown and white sculptural artwork of an abstract chair with a pregnant torso, bones, and feet.
Beige colored sculptural artwork with a spiral horn atop, a hand, feet, and many hair-like textures.
A gold and brown sculpture of a creature that has a human pregnant torso and four feet on the ground like a sphynx.
A brown, gold, and white abstract sculpture of an unknown creature on all fours.
A sculptural art work with a white birdcage, gold bone cross, feet, and a black bow.

Artist Bio

Nickola Pottinger was born in 1986 in Kingston, Jamaica and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union in 2008. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the New Museum, NY; Mrs. Gallery, Queens; Nicola Vassell, NY; Josh Lilley Gallery, London; Swivel Gallery, Brooklyn, Sargent’s Daughters, NY and Jenkins Johnson Gallery; among many others.

Audio

Hear artist Nickola Pottinger talk about labor. Nickola Pottinger: Fos Born, 2025.

Hear artist Nickola Pottinger talk about process. Nickola Pottinger: Fos Born, 2025.

Hear artist Nickola Pottinger talk about pregnancy. Nickola Pottinger: Fos Born, 2025.

Hear artist Nickola Pottinger talk about home. Nickola Pottinger: Fos Born, 2025.

Hear artist Nickola Pottinger talk about Hellshire Beach. Nickola Pottinger: Fos Born, 2025.

Hear artist Nickola Pottinger talk about Carnival. Nickola Pottinger: Fos Born, 2025.

Links

Press Release

Press

““The works themselves are created from collected papers. Archives from my family homes. My parents, my sister included, will have papers that they’ll shred and they’ll say ‘Hey Nicky, I’ve got a bag of shredded paper for you.’ And I’ll come pick it up. I started using paper pulp around 2020. My husband was at home, I was furloughed from work, he was still teaching remotely. And everyone was baking bread. I always wanted to do sculpture, but I was intimidated and didn’t know what material to use. It made sense to start with paper.”
—SSENSE
“Whether hanging from the wall, sitting on a pedestal or lying on the floor, Pottinger’s humanoid reliquaries find familiarity in the seemingly unknown, braiding disparate narratives together into talismans. There is a flux to these sculptures, a sense that their “becoming” could happen at any moment and in any anarchic fashion. Part of this tension lies in Pottinger’s penchant for line—originally trained in drawing, not in sculpture, she developed a highly personal, speculative procedure for her duppies, lending them a singular, haunting quality.”
—The Art Newspaper
“Within Jamaican culture, these figures straddle the physical and spiritual realms, looking for new spaces to inhabit; Pottinger considers her work as a sort of bridge. But she reintroduces these ancestral figures as our guardians or protectors, reconstituted to help preserve her family’s cultural heritage. 'The purpose of the work initially is to build and protect legacy—not just my own personal history, but of the history of where I come from and a culture that extends beyond country,' Pottinger once said in an interview. Somehow, this repurposing lends her work a lived-in quality, rather than an ominous one.”
—Cultured
“This argument crystallizes in fos born (2025), created while Pottinger was pregnant with her daughter Zora. Here, hybridity is doubled: sculpture and child, ancestor and descendant, fragment and coherence. The massive sculpture anchors the exhibition, two conjoined figures with large eyes positioned over casts of her breasts, a close-eyed head at the center seemingly in another dimension. Pottinger’s drawing and layering of pigment become more foreboding, as line and color thread between casts of her hands, breasts, and feet. Childhood hair ornamentation forms a crown, while hands cradle the cast of her pregnant belly. Fos born is saturated with care and vulnerability.”
—Impulse

Funders

Generous support for Nickola Pottinger: fos born is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Significant support is provided by Ellen and Andrew Celli and Dolly Bross Geary and Jack Geary. Additional support is provided by an anonymous donor and The Cowles Charitable Trust. The catalogue is supported by the Eric Diefenbach and James Keith Brown Publications Fund. Production support is provided by the Diana Bowes and Jim Torrey Commissions Fund.

Funders

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Catalogue cover that include a sculpture by artist Nickola Pottinger.

Nickola Pottinger: fos born

Top image: Nickola Pottinger: fos born (installation view), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, June 8, 2025 to January 11, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Mrs. © Nickola Pottinger. Photo: Olympia Shannon.