Bee Nicholls
Bee Nicholls – BA/BFA
Bee's work examines power dynamics held in places, materials and everyday systems, with a focus on the city and the office.
Her working background has generated extensive thought about the politics of the built environment, prompting questions about the people and activities that are prioritised in the city, and the ways in which long-standing intersecting inequalities are subsequently reinforced.
Bee’s current practice employs the phenomenon of weeds growing through pavements as a symbol of disruption, relating the perceived deviance of weeds in the city to body hair as seen by the male gaze. Using “hairy” material, she evokes the unsightly, untamed and ungovernable. Bee suggests that streets and buildings function within unfair and unsafe systems of power, the growth of weeds offering a quiet yet powerful resistance to the construction of this terrain.
Like weeds, the growth of body hair is quiet in practice, yet serves as a deeply political and confrontational gesture that disrupts the gaze and rejects patriarchal sexual ideals.