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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.”
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 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.