Introducing Nicole Young: Where Material Memory Meets Climate Consciousness

We’re Thrilled to Introduce Nicole Young

We are proud to welcome Nicole Young to our roster — a Vancouver-based artist. Her practice sits at one of the most compelling intersections in contemporary art: the space where ecological urgency meets material tenderness.

A Studio That Thinks Like an Ecosystem

Step into Nicole Young’s studio and you’ll find it humming with a kind of productive accumulation. Rolls of hand-dyed linen lean against stretched canvas. Fabric offcuts in dusty rose, slate blue, and teal are sorted and re-sorted. Sketchbooks fill with compositional studies — geometric and organic forms jostling against each other, waiting to be translated into something larger. Nothing here is wasted. That’s the point.

Nicole works at the junction of environmentalism, material exploration, and storytelling. Her paintings are as much science experiments as they are conversations about how we might approach climate justice. She explores climate justice not through protest, but through practice. In particular, she does so through the daily, stubborn act of making something beautiful out of what already exists.

The Work

Nicole’s process begins well before paint touches canvas. She sources repurposed painted canvas, thrifted textiles, and natural materials — plants, earth, organic matter — from which she extracts her own pigments and dyes. The resulting palette is earthy but never dull. It includes deep burgundies, warm ochres, muted lavenders, and sage greens that feel pulled from the landscape rather than manufactured.

These dyed and repurposed fabrics are then cut, layered, and sewn onto canvas, colliding with gestural, painterly marks. The effect is a body of work that refuses easy categorization. Her pieces move fluidly between large-scale textile installations, sewn works on canvas, and drawing. She blends traditional approaches to textile art with a bold, painterly confidence. Geometric fields of flat color press up against soft watercolor washes; hard-edged shapes dissolve into organic pooling and bloom.

There is a conversation happening in each work — between control and release, between the handmade and the found, between the deliberate and the accidental. Between human intervention and natural process.

The Philosophy

For Nicole, the act of making is inseparable from the act of caring. Sourcing natural pigments deepens her connection to the land. Working with thrifted and repurposed materials enacts a commitment to waste-free practice. Her studio is a proof of concept — that an art practice can be ecologically thoughtful without sacrificing ambition or beauty.

This is particularly resonant given where she lives and works: on the traditional, unceded and occupied territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations in Vancouver, Canada. That acknowledgment isn’t incidental to her practice — it’s part of the same ethical fabric that shapes how she sources materials. Additionally, it shapes how she makes and what she makes about.

About the Artist

Nicole Young (b. 1990) was born in Ontario and received her BFA in Visual Arts and Art History from the University of British Columbia Okanagan. She also studied studio arts and art history at the University of California Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited in Canada and internationally since 2010. Her paintings are held in private and corporate collections around the world. She is also an art consultant, bringing the same discerning eye she applies to her studio practice to helping others build meaningful collections.

We are so proud to represent Nicole and look forward to sharing her work with collectors, institutions, and fellow admirers of art that asks something of the world.

Click here to view Nicole Young’s available works.