Photo: Jona Jalink 2025
Artist Biography
Nina Fraser (1984) b. St. Albans, UK, is a multidisciplinary artist, reflecting upon a sense of place to shape memory traces into physical form. She uses collage thinking as a primary tool in her visual art practice and as a toolbox to build community through formal and informal learning exchange. She holds a Postgraduate Degree in Curating and Commissioning Public Art from HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, and Bachelor's Degree in Textile Art from Winchester College of Arts, University of Southampton (UK). She has participated in numerous group exhibitions worldwide and has had several solo exhibitions in Portugal and the UK. Artist residencies focus on ecology and sustainability and include; “Plant thinking”, Estação Viva, Canelas, Portugal (2023); “Mycelium”, Roccamonfina, Italy (2023); Largo Residências, Lisbon, Portugal (2022-23); and “Body & Place”, Owlpen Manor, Gloucestershire, UK (2019). In 2025 she was a participatory artist for LABECO - Cooperative Laboratory for Artistic and Ecological Practices working between Lisbon and Marseille.
Nina’s work is represented in the public and private collections including: Coleção Figueiredo Ribeiro, Coleção Grupo IMPRESSA, Portugal; Casa das Artes de Tavira, Portugal; and Retroavangarda, Poland amongst others. Nina’s collages have been published in magazines and books, including “Collage Care: Transforming Emotions & Life Experiences” edited by Kanyer Art Collection, 2021.
Since 2008, she has co-created several artistic and community projects, including The Art House Southampton Community Cafe (co-founding director, 2008 - 2014), and Collage Working Club - an informal space for learning and sharing collage practice and thinking (2022 - to date). She works as artistic coordinator of Art & Craft Refúgio - a project located at Jardins do Bombarda, Lisbon, which integrates migrants and refugees through the practice of arts and crafts (2022 - to date) and is also a regular facilitator with the neurodiverse community at Loucamente, Montijo (2025).
Artist Statement
Drawn to concepts and methods that derive from the fragmented image, my interest lies in combining them with an instinctive ‘brush’ stroke that manipulates the hierarchy of traditionally separate mediums (painting, printmaking, collage). Lately, it is also about the way we make rhizomatic connections and interact with our surroundings. I often draw upon the metaphor of mycelium to frame my work. Like fungi that slip through classification systems, the world becomes less of an ordered system, and more of a place of re-exploration - art is not just the outcome, but the ecosystem that enables it. This perspective allows me to reimagine artistic practice as collective, adaptive, and non-linear that challenge competitive and capitalist models of art making. Themes of interconnection, resilience, and regeneration run through my projects, often shaped by personal and social crises. Rather than isolating nature to the symbolic order of structures of thought and polarities, there is an understanding of a perception of the vegetal world as a fundamentally symbiotic system of interrelations between roots, rhizomes and soil.
Artist CV >