Step inside textile artist Nicola Henley’s dreamy Co Clare farmhouse
Through a medley of media, textile artist Nicola Henley creates evocative portrayals of the natural world, capturing its breathtaking beauty, liberty and continuity.
British-born, Co Clare-based artist Nicola Henley’s happiest childhood memories are of hot-air ballooning with her father as a child. He was a member of Bristol’s first ballooning team, and would often take the young Nicola out with him on early mornings before school. “I remember being at my happiest,” she recalls, “and the idea of flying – of being free – has remained really strong within me.”
The textile artist has built her practice around this passion. Inspired by the landscape and intrigued by the movement of birds within it, Nicola explores ideas of transience and permanence, motion and stillness, abandon and restraint in large-scale wall hangings, which consistently feature her signature bird motifs. “I never get tired of birds,” she explains. “They move without borders. They navigate the width of the earth. It’s profound.”
Swapping her urban upbringing in the southwest of England for a rural farmhouse in the west of Ireland in the early 1990s gave Nicola the space, surroundings and serenity to pursue her art, but also to raise her young family with that same sense of freedom she strives to capture in her work.
“I was desperate to raise my children in an environment where they could run free and enjoy nature,” she says. Her parents had a great love of Ireland, so she had spent many happy childhood summers here. “I have always loved the wildness of it.”
It’s the wildness of Ballinskelligs in Co Kerry that provides much of the inspiration for her preparatory sketching, or source material.
“I spend a lot of time at Cill Rialaig Arts Centre, drawing and sketching to create a body of work on paper that I can bring back to my studio,” Nicola says.
That studio is a purpose-built, light-flooded, timber-framed building in her garden, with views of the Slieve Bearnagh mountains to the front and hens busily clucking about to the rear. Until four years ago, she worked from a barn adjoining her late 19th century farmhouse home, which Nicola serendipitously happened upon back in 1991 after viewing a nearby cottage that was for sale.
It was being used by a local farmer to house cattle, and despite the cattle crush at the front of the house, its derelict state and the fact that it wasn’t on the market, Nicola immediately fell in love with it. “This is the house I’m going to live in,” she promised herself.
She and her then partner “gently cajoled” the owner – now a good friend – into selling and they embarked on a sensitive restoration of both buildings. “But there was never really enough light in the barn, and it had cold stone floors,” she explains, so floor-to-ceiling windows and a wood-burning stove make the timber-framed studio her dream workspace.
As well as working to commission, Nicola regularly exhibits internationally and she is currently preparing for a show in Australia, so this is an enormously demanding time, as each large-scale piece can take up to a month to complete.
Nicola’s pieces are multi-layered and process-heavy, and they begin with a large piece of calico, which she dyes, hand paints and screen prints. The calico is then handwashed to remove any chemical residue, dried, steamed and repainted to bolster the colours, which can lose their intensity at this point. “There’s a physicality to this side of the work; a rigorousness that’s extremely demanding,” she explains.
Nicola describes the next stage, where she focuses on small areas for textural work, such as embroidery and hand stitching, as “meditative”.
On an old domestic sewing machine, Nicola uses free motion stitching, whereby the needle behaves like a pen, to attach fragments of hand-printed Japanese paper, dyed muslin and swatches of silk.
“I want the viewer to respond to each finished piece from a distance, and then to revel in the detail when they come in close,” she says.
The final elements of this textural jigsaw puzzle can only be decided after the work has been viewed hanging on Nicola’s studio wall. “I will often stand on a ladder to view a piece on my worktop, but I always see things differently once it’s hanging.”
Nicola explains that the scale to which she works is becoming more challenging as she gets older, so she’s beginning to look at evolving her methods and themes to suit smaller-scale pieces. “For my next show, I plan to include a series of five small, square-shaped works.”
Nicola describes her life in Co Clare as “everything I dreamed of”. I imagine the freedom she’s found living and working in tandem with nature even beats the thrill of a hot-air balloon ride. Nicola regularly holds screen-printing workshops in her Co Clare studio.
Photography: Shantanu Starick
This feature originally appeared in the Autumn/Winter 2022 issue of IMAGE Interiors.
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