Nicola Hicks is known primarily for her extraordinarily textured sculptures of animals, people and hybrids thereof. Here charcoal drawings and etchings have a brilliant balance between rough physicality and disintegrating ephemeral line.
There size is almost overwhelming, yet there is a delicacy in both the marks (despite their display of bravura) and in the material. Thin brown paper was simply tacked to the wall of the gallery when I last saw here work.
There is some truth in Flowers Gallery’s claim that her work “often combines charm and menace in equal and sometimes devastating measures”.
The Hidden Place 