Bio

Zoe Nichols is an interdisciplinary artist and writer currently based in the Pacific Northwest. Her practice explores mortality, attention, and the visual language of absence. Using found objects, words, light, and secrets, Nichols arranges poetic installations that invite viewers to attend to stories of absence.

Nichols’ project-based practice has been greatly informed by anticipatory grief. Death draws out a visual language of absence. Attention follows. Nichols, herself, has been alive for 8,856 days. She spends most of her time in general awe of having hands and eyeballs. She is close friends with her shadow and thinks it funny that the sun traveled all this way, only to be interrupted a few feet before hitting the ground. As the daughter of a photographer, Nichols’ eyes are trained to scan a space for light. She is interested in the things a photographer should be interested in - light, index, memory - but she stubbornly avoids the medium, so she has taken up arson instead. The non-incriminating kind. Turning objects into charcoal is a subtractive process that homogenizes, similar to death. Through the biochar method, Nichols has been turning objects into shadows. This compliments her practice of casting shadow into positive form; the former ephemeralizes the tangible, the latter memorializes the intangible.Though her installations place emphasis on the absent, Nichols hopes to respect the sacredness of things hidden, and so shrouds certain secrets in her installations. Perhaps this brings us closer to the language of death. Nichols is increasingly curious about storytelling, poetics, end-life-care, and facilitating conversations about death and dying.

Nichols holds a B.A. in Art Studies and Philosophy from Belmont University. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across Nashville. Influenced by undergraduate studies in phenomenology and art theory, Nichols spent her early career reflecting on the presence found in absence and light. With a year-long grant, the Walter and Sarah Knestrick Award, Nichols embodied this research by attending a Skycave Dark Retreat in January 2025. This involved sitting in absolute darkness for four consecutive days. When outside becomes one field, the inside lights up! After attending the retreat, Nichols was offered a summer residency at Skycave. The grant culminated in her most recent body of work, These Walls are My Skin. Nichols maintains a strong arts community in Nashville, but she continues to live and work at Skycave Dark Retreats in Southern Oregon. She nests in a treehouse and spends her free time sitting in the dark or grinning at her shadow. She watches for deer-tracks in the mud and waits patiently for the next secret to reveal itself.