Nichola Raubenheimer

VIRTUAL TOUR

ARTIST CATALOGUE

A breath in-between (read the second line)

My work is a devotion, a confession - an exploration of what it means to live, die, and live again through the idea of a second life. A breath caught between ending and beginning, a space suspended between grief and becoming. Through the material, I become both mourner and midwife, guiding a second life when the first breath has been lost but refuses to disappear. It begins with brokenness, remnants, the disregarded, the wounded, the absent, and matter that feel lost. Material holds a pulse, it’s about allowing things to fall apart, what leaks, and aches and reborn just temporarily. memory scattered like shells. Truths that hurt to say but live beneath the skin. 

Creation becomes a way of making sense of the mess, of touching what hurts without being consumed by it. I work with dolls, bodies I can interact with as a form of complicity - feel touch without recoiling; to face the body without fear. The cracks are fragile, imperfect fragments, but not failures. They are truths that feel right - my “uglies,” spoken aloud. I am self-defensive; I cannot let people come close because they will see the reflection I am trapped inside. I isolate; I mistake hurt for purpose. I overgive until I am bare-boned, stripped of fruit. I refuse help because I have learned to fall and cope alone. To accept that in collapse there are contractions - that I am not whole, but fragmented. These fragments hold stories and burdens that need a vessel outside of me. None of this resolves them, but allows them to keep breaking and mending on their own. In the end, this work is a love letter to the grotesque, the imperfect, the human. A reminder that even in decay, there is grace. Even in the end, there is a second breath. Even in holes, there is the possibility of becoming whole. 

Dedication: My mother gave me life — and then I gave myself a second life. So I will nurture and care for my practice, my being, for as long as I can. I dedicate this to everyone I have written to, gifted, and loved — to all those who have helped me get through this. To the mentors who saw something I couldn’t and gave me a space to be vulnerable. To the loves of my life — the ones who didn’t turn away when they saw my “uglies.” To every single quotable object that allowed me its agency. To my family — as stubborn, irrational, and chaotic as we are, but always, somehow, unconditional. And finally, I dedicate this to myself, and to those who truly know me.