Multispecies records: we carry on

A 2023 collage on paper titled, Multispecies records: we carry on by the South African artist Nicola Grobler (b.1976). Short biography: Nicola Grobler was born in 1976. She obtained a degree in Fine Art with distinction from the University of Pretoria, before relocating to London to pursue her interest in graphic design and digital media. She returned to Cape Town in 2002 and was awarded a Master of Fine Art, with distinction, from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, in 2004. She was the team leader for the interdisciplinary SANParks / SANParks Honorary Rangers project (2012-2013), which involved the Department of Drama and the Information Design section. She facilitated a series of public interventions, entitled #Intersections, for the Cool Capital Biennale 2014, as part of the Fine Arts curriculum. Grobler’s creative and theoretical research is focused on artistic practices in relation to human-animal entanglements, urban ecology, the everyday, aesthetics, participation and agency. She completed her Fine Arts PhD at the University of Cape Town and was the recipient of the National Research Foundation of South Africa’s Thuthuka grant and the University of Pretoria’s Vice-Chancellor’s grant (2016). Grobler’s drawings, sculptures, installations and interventions serve to amplify the minute detail of everyday life. She operates with a different optic, which assesses and reconsiders the value of things. Her work reflects a concern with the economy of value in a world fixated with the concrete. By infusing the ordinary with the poetic she shows other possibilities for describing human relations to the world and with each other. Grobler has participated in numerous group exhibitions and solo exhibitions. She is a lecturer in Fine Art studio practice and contemporary art discourse at the Department of Visual Arts, in the School of Arts, Faculty of Humanities at the University of Pretoria.