For ‘Our Emotions Are Real’ is Nicola Field is sharing visual-text drawings and paintings, as large-scale prints, to trace a journey from outsiderness and isolation, to kinship and collective imagining. A revolutionary’s own personal revolution.

Nicola is a lifelong activist, artist and writer, based in Peckham, south London. An original member of Lesbians and Gay Support the Miners, the group that featured in the 2014 hit film Pride, she is the author of Over the Rainbow: Money, Class and Homophobia, and will bring copies of her book to sell at a special price to Art Bank visitors. Prints of her art work can be ordered directly via her website www.nicolafield.co.uk.

She was a member of the Lesbian and Gay Youth Video Project collective which made ‘Framed Youth’, an early scratch-video C4 documentary, which won the BFI Grierson award, and has exhibited her videos, sculptures, drawings and paintings at BFI Southbank, the V&A, Ortus, the Paxton, Tower Bridge Engine Rooms and other galleries and spaces.

Nicola last visited Art Bank to speak about her LGBTQ+ political campaigning experiences in 2021. Currently, Nicola is studying for a PhD at Kingston University, using creative writing and visual art to explore family trauma and neurodiversity, and bring together her artistic and political passions.

Her poems, articles and reviews have been published in the radical press, arts magazines and academic journals.

Nicola has continued to link the fight against oppression with community, housing and workplace struggles over the past 40 years, speaking at universities, conferences, festivals, trade union events, schools and book events internationally and across the UK. Most recently she has taken part in a campaign against low pay, inequalities, overwork and casualisation, as a member of the University and College Union (UCU).

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The exhibition runs until the end of March and encourages the viewer’s own take on visual-text drawings and paintings, to be exhibited in a dedicated space within the venue.

Part-supported by Open Mental Health Somerset.