“I Have It All But I Still Want More”: Chatting With Artist Nicole Dyer
“Last year I abstained, this year I devour.” — Margaret Atwood
Nicole Dyer’s recent homunculus is a gloriously fat Topo Chico bottle with frosted pink flowers peeking out of the top. Puffy butterfly stickers adorn the canvas along with glued-on pearls. This is her trademark melt.
Currently based in Baltimore, Nicole is an incredibly playful artist that catches and hooks the eye. Her work, which has been featured in both solo and partnered exhibitions, mainly focuses on the experience of living with and recovering from an eating disorder and dealing with food as a result. Instead of attempting to maintain a sense of minimalism, which could be said is the aesthetic of denial, Nicole’s work embraces the notion of taking up space. It is a wholehearted celebration of gluttony, consumption and delicious greed.
Her inspiration stems from the colorful and mundane. This includes various candy store assortments, Sun Cola, flower seed bags, stout jars of peanut butter, 99 cent luncheon loafs, electric sour worms, plastic baskets, pastel sardine boxes and Haribo bags. Always Haribo.
Nicole’s work isn’t limited in any one medium. Her portfolio is extensive, including illustrations and rugs among everything else. I was delighted to find her ceramics, which are charming in the way candy wrappers are charming, ambitious in their existence. A few of them include a trio of white-headed, glossy incense bottles, a crumbled-up Whole Foods receipt, and glasses that appear to be made of taffy with salmon-pink lenses. One of the most iconic pieces of her portfolio is undoubtedly the giant, bright yellow Balenciaga bag full of nonedible peppermints.
I had the pleasure to talk with Nicole about flowers, social media and candy.
Is your most recent Instagram post at all related to your Quarantine Flowers project? What do flowers mean to you?
Only in the way that flowers are nice and they make me happy. We could all use a bit of happiness right now!
How does the Baltimore landscape influence your work, if it does?
I appreciate the connections I’ve made here. I love that Baltimore’s food scene, for me, is made up of pals opening up coffee shops, restaurants, wine bars, and bakeries that I get to pop into and see their friendly faces and enjoy their products. For the most part, I know the person whose business I am frequenting and I think that makes Baltimore really special.
What is an important (or first) food-related memory for you?
Food has always been really complicated for me and while there are special memories involving cooking and eating with friends, there is also a memory of anxiety. I remember visiting my father once and eating huge sundaes and grilled cheese from Friendly’s. I also remember the disappointment from my mother when I came home from that trip a few sizes too big for the clothes she had recently bought me.
The Balenciaga bag! It’s such an iconic piece of work. What was your motivation behind it? How many people tried to eat the mints?
Thank you! A lot of my work is about monumentalizing products that we want but “can’t have” — whether that be through restriction of certain foods or, in this case, it being unaffordable. I wanted to make this bag larger than life. At the same time, I filled it with handmade peppermints that reminded me of the free bowls of mints you might find as you exit the buffet. Those mints are free to be taken yet inside of this giant, almost monstrous bag. I wanted to create this feel of need and want but can’t have.
Luckily, as far as I know, no one has tried to eat the candy!
I also sense that the bright colors you use in creating these foods are kind of sickly in a way, a warning. Like they possibly resemble that fear they conjure. Is that a conscious choice?
YES. Thank you! I love the concept of something looking SO good, but you know it’s going to make you sick. I have found through my recovery that often that is the case with “bad foods.” I believe we want things so much more when we tell ourselves we can’t have them, which just puts whatever that is on a pedestal and makes it appear better than it truly is. I think all my work has a darkness to it yet presented in a bright and cheery way.
In your opinion, what influence did the rise and daily implementation of social media have on how we interact with food?
Weight loss and wellness are extremely popular marketing triggers in the U.S. Social media makes it easy for people to spread opinions and ideals around like facts without research to back it up. It’s up to the consumer to research what they see online and determine its worth. As we can see from the spread of under-researched information in social media the past few months, that doesn’t often happen. So basically we’re just being bombarded with whatever health and wellness BS that sells — it’s dangerous. It’s important that people organize their feed and block content that is unhealthy for them. I get TikToks for 1200-calorie plans in my timeline constantly. I’m happy I’ve gotten to a place where if I see that I instantly block it, because I know it’s not serving me.
Eating disorders are a universal problem for all identities.
Jasmine Ledesma lives in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared or is set to appear in places like Borderlands, Vice, Rattle and [PANK] among others. Her work was also nominated for both Best of The Net and the Pushcart Prize in 2020. She was recently awarded a fellowship with Brooklyn Poets.
