Nicole Havekost

Based in Rochester, Minnesota, Nicole Havekost’s practice centers on the female body, which she reimagines as a sovereign organism that is simultaneously exquisite and abject. Havekost’s ongoing series of monumental soft sculptures are painstakingly sewn with gestural lines of red thread over steel armatures and adorned with thousands of hooks and eyes. Akin to drawing in space, stitching is a labor-intensive practice of mark making. For Nicole, “Piercing, pulling, and closing each stitch is aggressive and restorative. Stitching is an act of accumulation; it is a collection of marks, moments, and attachments that give shape to a form.” The artist’s sculptures are a potent reminder that despite our desire to tame and groom our bodies, corporeality is inescapable. Ripe with raw physicality, her headless figures draw from modernist sculptural traditions – including the familial groupings of Henry Moore and the anguished femininity of Louise Bourgeois.

Havekost earned her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from the University of New Mexico. She has exhibited extensively throughout the United States, including recent solo presentations at St. Catherine’s University (2024), the South Bend Museum of Art (2023), the University of Minnesota (2021), The Minneapolis Institute of Art (2020), and The Morris Graves Museum of Art (2019). Havekost is a member of A.I.R. Gallery in New York and the recipient of Minnesota State Arts Board grants in 2020, 2018, and 2013.