Nikki Barber
Nikki Barber
Seattle-based printmaker and teaching artist, was born in Bellingham, WA to an Anglo-Swedish father and Lebanese mother. She focuses on the way people communicate feelings, culture cues, and emotional safety through botanical symbols and depictions of flora and fauna. She graduated from the University of Washington with an Interdisciplinary Visual Arts degree with a focus in printmaking and a separate Bachelor of Science degree in Biological Sciences. She primarily teaches printmaking at Pratt Fine Art Center, Seattle Artist League, Pilchuck Glass School, and other art schools in the Seattle area. She is represented by MESH Fine Art in Chicago, IL.
Nikki regularly leads community engagement projects, including with the Seattle Art Museum. She sits on the advisory board for Seattle Print Arts and coordinates juried shows, in partnership with Davidson Galleries. Nikki balances making and selling her hand-pulled fine art prints; photographing works on paper for Davidson Galleries; and teaching community art classes.
I am a queer, mixed race woman who has PTSD. Each day involves sorting through emotions, feelings, and memories my body carries with me from my childhood and young adult life. I am slowly confronting and releasing the hurts I carry with me and learning to heal both my mind and body. Cutting woodblocks has been a soothing and healing process I have learned to use to ease this and reconnect my mind and body. It is meditative and calming to take a raw emotion or memory and translate it into something that comes from me and through me as ink on paper before moving out of my hands and into someone else’s.
My work calls on Middle Eastern (MENAP), Norse, and Pacific Northwestern symbolism including pomegranates, snakes, stag antlers, and poppies. I use symbology to keep myself from getting ‘spooked’ from direct narration. These symbols feel like visual comfort blankets, releasing pain and joy as I work through my own past and my family’s, expanding this intimate cycle of healing a little further.
Photo credit: Adam Wells
