Penumbra

Walkthrough Penumbra with artist Nicole Havekost.

Based in Rochester, Minnesota, Havekost’s practice centers on the female body whose forms she extracts, magnifies, abstracts, and multiplies. Imbued with raw physicality, new works on paper, wall reliefs, and sculptures construct the shared experience of female corporeality with tender, laborious gestures.

Hidden scars and visceral protrusions are rendered in the delicate poked holes, deep red pastels, and crystal flecks of Havekost’s oeuvre. Through fields of mottled silver and deep voids of powdery graphite, a tactile vocabulary of somatic abstraction emerges through forms split with fissures and tears. Building a universe out of skin, the artist’s materiality nods to both Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois. The space of Penumbra also recalls Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born (1986), in which the writer argues that “Far from existing in the mode of ‘inner space,’ women are powerfully and vulnerably attuned both to ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ because for us the two are continuous, not polar.”

Through gentle pierces, slits, and voids, Havekost expresses this expansive continuum in otherworldly objects. Evoking geological time, the artist sculpts paper into dimensional bodies that glow with celestial presence. Geometric motifs across the drawings create forms that pulse with energy, transforming our looking into something akin to stargazing. In Trickle (2024), an egg-like planet striated with grooves and tiny craters is a universe unto itself. At other times, the drawings exude the spirit of metamorphosis in winged, ethereal creatures.

Rendering physicality with striking vulnerability, the intimacy of Havekost’s sculptures can be uncomfortable, bringing viewers face to face with the taboo of living in a female body even as the curvature of its physique exudes beauty and birth. For Havekost, “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.” In Gape (2024), a vulvate form rendered in stitched felt hardened with beeswax is sprinkled with rock salt. Spine (2024), a round wall relief, presents a deep red scar protruding through a stitched metallic sphere bruised with glowing embers rendered with soft and oil pastels. In Source (2024), a life size figure with shimmering nipples protruding from a mineral crust, stretches up to a point.

In a recent interview, Havekost says: “I am a daughter, wife, mother. I have felt misunderstood and unrecognized. My femininity has often been a mystery to even me. Putting the focus on the female allowed me to explore contradictions in my own experiences that often felt universal to the women I shared them with.”

Nicole Havekost lives and works in Rochester, Minnesota. She earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the University of New Mexico. She has exhibited extensively throughout the United States including recent solo and two-person exhibitions at the Rochester Art Center, Minnesota (2023), South Bend Museum of Art (2023), Catherine F. Murphy Gallery, St. Catherines’s University (2023) ,Minneapolis Institute of Art (2021) and Morris Graves Museum of Art in California (2019).