Sarah Nicole "Water Angel Bloom"

Sarah Nicole is a Minneapolis-based artist whose work bridges the emotional and elemental through a process-driven approach to painting. Working with diluted acrylic on raw canvas, she treats water as a collaborator, allowing gravity, absorption, and evaporation to shape each composition. Her floral forms operate as symbolic vessels informed by embodied experiences of femininity and motherhood, holding traces of presence, loss, and renewal. She received her BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2018. Her work has been exhibited with Good To Know, Hair + Nails, Public Functionary, Studio Underground, and Salon 21.

Artist Statement: 

"Water Angel Bloom is part of Sarah Nicole’s ongoing Dusk Bloom series, conceived in 2024. The paintings trace the emotional and physical contours of femininity, shaped by embodied experiences of motherhood. Working with raw canvas and a soak-stain technique, she treats water as a collaborator, flooding, diluting, and staining the surface in gestures guided as much by gravity and evaporation as by her own hand. Repeated and refined over time, these actions form quiet rituals that give shape to ephemeral states.
Guided by floral silhouettes as symbolic vessels of feminine experience and resilience, her compositions unfold at scale, evoking both the beauty of the organic and the physicality of the body. The interiors of these forms emerge through the slow withdrawal of water, revealing residues of movement and time.
In this practice, time becomes visible: in pooled pigment, in edges left by evaporated washes, and in the subtle transformation of canvas as it absorbs and releases. Each painting holds a record of presence and dissolution, reflecting cycles of becoming and release.
Within this body of work, the Water Angel Blooms forms a sub-series reflecting bodies of water. The flow of river and ocean becomes symbolic of washing over and cleansing, carrying an inner light while holding the weight of depth and wave." - Sarah Nicole