Nickola Pottinger

Nickola Pottinger (born 1986 in Kingston, Jamaica) is a Jamaican artist and curator based in Brooklyn, New York, whose multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, installation, drawing, collage, and heavily textured relief. Drawing upon Jamaican folklore, family history, Caribbean diasporic experience, spirituality, and the physical residue of everyday life, Pottinger creates hybrid objects that shift between human figure, animal, furniture, architectural fragment, and supernatural presence. She calls many of these sculptural forms “duppies,” after the Jamaican Patois term for ghosts or spirits, using them to explore ancestry, reincarnation, protection, memory, and the ways histories continue to inhabit the present.  Material transformation is central to Pottinger’s practice. She gathers family documents, discarded papers, cardboard, earlier artworks, rubble, broken ceramics, furniture, organic matter, and personal objects, then turns much of that material into handmade paper pulp using a handheld kitchen mixer borrowed from her mother’s kitchen. The pulp functions almost like clay or concrete, allowing her to mold bodies and irregular surfaces before incorporating oil pastel, watercolor, pigment, gold leaf, teeth, hair accessories, castings of her own hands or face, Yagua palm leaves, shells, lava rock, fabric, bones, and other found materials. Family archives are therefore not simply referenced in the sculptures—they are physically broken down and remade into new forms.  Pottinger’s Jamaican upbringing and return visits to the island have increasingly shaped the environmental dimensions of her work. Recent sculptures respond to memories of Kingston, family homes, Jamaican proverbs and Patois, as well as drought, water rationing, coastal erosion, disappearing forests, and the ecological consequences of resort development. Folklore, environmental change, humor, grief, Catholic imagery, domestic memory, and family storytelling coexist within objects that operate as both personal reliquaries and speculative spiritual beings. Her background in dance also informs her improvisational approach: movement, automatism, gesture, and bodily intuition guide how materials are cut, rearranged, accumulated, and transformed.  Pottinger earned a BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2008. Her work has been presented at MoMA PS1, the New Museum, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, P·P·O·W, White Columns, Nicola Vassell, CANADA, Sargent’s Daughters, Chapter NY, Cooper Cole, Galerie Julien Cadet, and other venues. Her 2025 exhibition fos born at The Aldrich marked her first solo museum exhibition and expanded her practice through a body of work addressing pregnancy, motherhood, inheritance, family, and Jamaican spiritual traditions. In 2026, she was included in Greater New York 2026 at MoMA PS1 and received the Artists & Mothers Grant, a $25,000 childcare award supporting artists raising young children. She continues to live and work in Brooklyn and has been represented by Mrs. since 2025.