Barbara Nicholls will exhibit recent watercolours made following her residency at the Nordic Watercolour Museum, Sweden, September 2025. This is a dedicated museum for watercolour painting situated in Skärhamn and located on Tjörn Island in Bohuslän  by the Baltic Sea. Nicholls worked surrounded by dramatic, coastal, glacial, geology defined by rugged granite cliffs, barren rocky shores full of numerous reefs, skerries, and deep, clear waters full of streaming seaweed.

“My paintings are not about depicting the landscape in a traditional sense; instead, I am focused on recreating the very processes- the flows, the erosions, the depositions- that form the landscape itself”.

Nicholls has developed her own techniques working on sheets of thick paper placed on the horizontal which connects them directly to the landscape. Using watercolour she can nurture the accumulating residues of pigments adding them to large pools of water. The work dries from a simulated and engineered studio climate as wind over a lake. The undulating paper surface water drains off like streams flowing from a hill. The resulting translucent layers link the work to geological forms and time and so it becomes a microcosm of the world.

“In retrospect, having made many watercolours in the way I do, I realise that to some extent I am redefining or at least expanding what watercolour can achieve”.

Barbara Nicholls, May 2026

Barbara Nicholls biog.

Born Handforth, Cheshire UK 1963.

Lives and works in London and the Peak Disctrict 

Represented by Patrick Heide Contemporary Art, London/Brussels.

​Studied: Goldsmiths College, University of London BA Fine Art (1982-86), University of East London MFA (1996-98) and a Doctorate (2000-06).

Barbara Nicholls has had her work widely and internationally exhibited, including Norwich Castle Museum (2026) Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Germany (2026 & 2015) Patrick Heide Contemporary Art, (2025, 2023 & 2022), Ben Parsons Gallery + Hannah Payne (2023) The Jetty Museum Windermere, (2022) JGM Gallery London (2020 & 2019), The Turnpike, Leigh, (2019) Städtisches Museum- Galerie im Centrum-Wesel, Germany (2019) The New Art Gallery Walsall, (2017), Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery NSW Australia (2017), , Griffin Gallery London (2013), Tourhaus Romberg Park Dortmund Germany (2013), Emerson Gallery Berlin (2013), Dok25a Düsseldorf Germany (2012), Projektraum-bahnhof25 Kleve, Germany (2012), KARST Plymouth UK (2012) Pavillon am Milchhof Berlin (2011), APT Gallery London (2008), Imperial War Museum London (2002).