Nicki Avena is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores memory, materiality, legacy, and the limits of representation. Avena sources photography from personal archives, draws and paints, and incorporates found objects, textiles, geological materials, and collected artifacts into her work. Her work underscores the impossibility of constructing complete narratives, through encounters with the physical world.

Avena is heavily informed by walking, observation, and movement through landscapes, interested in the histories embedded within objects and the gaps between lived experience, memory, and documentation. Through processes of layering, obscuring, cutting, and recombining images and materials, she considers permanence, loss, belonging, and the unknowability of people and places.

Her practice engages with phenomenology, new materialism, ecology, memoir, and vernacular histories. The accumulations of images and objects in her compositions resist singular narratives, allowing meaning to remain layered, relational, and unresolved.

Avena has 13+ years working as a graphic designer, and that work can be viewed on her design website: NickiAvena.com. Her CV is available to view and download here.