Artist Interview with Nikki Culley: Connections
Summer 2025 Artist-in-Residence at Garden City Harvest
Nikki Culley, Artist-in-Residence at Garden City Harvest
Describe your Open AIR Residency Experience.
I would describe my Open AIR Residency as creating artwork that reflects an ever-evolving network of connections made with people, in the context of land and place.
How did the residency influence or change your artistic direction?
This dynamic that drove my creative direction during the residency, on reflection, was inspired by the character of my partner site, Garden City Harvest. GCH is a network of people working together across 22 disparate pieces of land in Missoula. There was this feeling at Garden City Harvest, of bringing the garden’s people, land, community, and stories together, one piece at a time. I used photographs and cyanotype fabric patches; these will all be sewn together in a quilt for the final art piece.
This creative direction became rooted in a pursuit of making connections, like one domino leading effortlessly to the next, and seemed to take on a life of its own, spilling out beyond the garden site and into a wider experience of community, land, and place in Missoula.
Note: Nikki’s cyantotype quilt & photographs are in the upcoming group show.
Greg Price, Garden City Harvest director of the River Road Community Garden.
Photographed by Nikki
The art I made became a way to pull together the story of the garden community and to also bridge personal connections for me in a new place. For example, I made tester photographic cyanotype patches with new friends down by the river to prepare for workshops with the garden.
In this way, the art I made during the residency became a way to connect; me to the new country and place I was living in - coming from the UK; the story of the gardens’ community; and people living in Missoula to the community work of Garden City Harvest.
Cyanotype prints drying, from Nikki’s Workshop at River Road Farm
What are you reading/watching/or listening to?
At the moment, I’m learning lots from listening to All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert, Gather Together in My Name by Maya Angelou, and Be Water, My Friend: The True Teachings of Bruce Lee by Shannon Lee. I mostly listen to long-form podcasts that do interviews with people about their life stories and areas of expertise around topics of human psychology, neuroscience, and relationships like Diary of a CEO, the the Louis Theroux podcats, and Rich Roll’s podcast.
I listened to so much music as I was traveling around Missoula to make photographs. My residency was framed by lots of Oasis to connect me to home in Manchester, UK, and also lots of Portishead, Radiohead, and Cigarettes After Sex.
What role does place play in your work, especially during your time at Open AIR?
Place is core to the work. Specifically, people and a sense of place, and how that relationship is brokered through community structures. It’s endlessly fascinating to sit in the middle of these dynamics with a camera because every single person is like a thumbprint, and ideas of community are always growing, shifting, and adapting to the changing places they establish themselves in. This type of awareness and focus elicits endless possibilities. I thrive on constantly being unfamiliar and out of my comfort zone, which always leads to making something exciting.
Weeding in the garden, Garden City Harvest - River Road Farm
Photographed by Nikki
For you, what's the most rewarding aspect of being an artist or creative?
My work looks to be about sharing connections with others - sharing people’s stories, how their lives are connected to the place they live in, and each other. Making the invisible intertwining of all these threads visible in photographs is so rewarding. I really believe there are things and feelings that would never be seen if I didn’t take photographs to show them.
But what really drives my work underneath is a constant pursuit to uncover and know myself. In every adaptation to working with each person, I learn something of myself.
Greg Price at Garden City Harvest - River Road Farm
Photographed by Nikki
This interview has been edited slightly for clarity.
