Mae Nicolaou

infomation

Mae Nicolaou (b. 1997, Dublin, Ireland) is a visual artist based between London and Ireland. She holds an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London (2025). Her work, which oscillates between the figurative and the supposedly functional, finds its centre in the margins. Mae is interested in the representation of people engaged in the quotidian, choosing experience over reference as a methodology.

Her practice examines how often overlooked accompaniments of everyday life are gathered, handled, and redistributed. She collects and selects materials to produce unconventional inscriptions of contemporary life. Her practice employs slow processes such as traditional casting methods, but also faster analogue forms of image-making like frottage drawing. These processes form part of a heterogeneous yet continuous body of work. Mae is interested in how one-to-one,bodily relationships to objects and images have become increasingly dematerialised. Through her practice, she seeks to emphasise the distinction between the analogue and the digital, not as something purely ontological, but as something that registers through degrees and shifts in scale.

Both processes remain tied to the limitations and materiality of the human body. Her works can be read as embodied forms rather than visual representations, due to both the physical activity required to make them and the indexical traces of human culture they carry. With a reliance on lived experience, the very make-up of these traces turns on marking difference. These deliberate processes, developed specifically for her practice, enable her to activate her thoughts and ideas.