Nicky Heard graduated with a degree in Ceramics and Glass in 1988, going on to become the Head of Art in a School and teaching a diverse range of mixed media to students. After 25 years, Nicky left teaching to focus on her own art practise. She has, through experimenting with various media developed a fascination for close up details and texture. Working with wool has been a technique developed from exploring a more tactile and unusual method of ‘painting’. Various types of wool and fibres are applied onto a canvas surface using needle felting techniques to replicate effects of painting and blur the boundaries between art and craft.

Wildlife is the primary subject matter of Nicky’s wool paintings, often choosing vulnerable or endangered species with the aim of raising awareness of their reducing numbers in the wild. Although keeping the emphasis of her work on the beauty of our creatures she often combines the colour and textures of wool with the use of ink to depict the colour and detail fading away: the creature becoming more illustrative than real as we lose them from our natural world. A reminder that eventually we will only be able to see these wonderful creatures in books.