Nikki Douthwaite: Punching Holes Through Art

British artist Nikki Douthwaite dedicates up to fourteen hours a day to a hole puncher.  With a highly – focused precision, she creates fully fledged, celebrity portraits using a collage of thousands of tiny dots made with colored paper or magazine articles.  Her most recent work, a portrait of British racing driver James Hunt, was built using roughly 100,000 hole punched dots which were then tediously stuck, one-by-one, onto a wooden 5 by 4 foot canvas.  Inspired by the painting technique “Pointillism,” a style in which pure color is applied in patterns to create a distinct image, Douthwaite utilizes her would-be paint brush to create these optical illusions.

As a student of both color and science, Douthwaite’s own style borrows from one of the most recognized painters of the 19th century, Neo-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat.  Seurat was the first to work in “Pointillism,” his passion for the style originally harbored by his deep fascination with the recent findings of color and the brain’s interpretation of color.  He began working in Pointillism because it challenged the way color had generally been used. He believed that by utilizing these contrasting and complementary tones individually, he would be able to create an optical experience far more advanced than by simply mixing paints. Douthwaite follows this same school of thought in her own work.  Replacing paints with dots, she manipulates the brain’s interpretation of color by allowing the viewer to be equally overwhelmed by these chaotic dots when viewed close up, and then challenged to process them as a single image when stepping back from the piece.  She cites this experience as her main goal for the viewer when creating these portraits.  On her personal website, Douthwaite says she chooses to work in portraits because she has “an interest in faces, in the biological form; bone and muscle construction, sociological, expression and individuality.”  The precise placement of dots complements that interest – after spending hours sticking them on canvas with a tweezer, she knows each delicate curve of Marilyn Monroe, the slight glint of John Lennon’s glasses, or the hard jaw line of race car driver Mark Webber very well.  Despite having suffered repetitive strain injuries to her hand, arm, and shoulder from these hours spent on portraits, Douthwaite persists with her extraordinary hole punch art.

She began working in this medium largely in 2008 when completing her Interactive Arts Degree at the Manchester Metropolitan University in North West England.  She studied Seurat’s famous painting “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” as part of her dissertation, and even went so far as to travel to the Seine River in North France where Seurat himself received inspiration for the piece.  In an interview with Manchester School of the Arts, Douthwaite recalls her time there: “I went to see what it was like now.  I sat there for three days recording people coming and going.  I knew I had to do something different.”   And it was from there that she embarked on her process to create, like Seurat, images that used Pointillism as their means of expression.

Using her hole puncher, she obsessively collects buckets in her Manchester home that carry thousands of pieces of punched out paper.  She says of her cramped work space, “My house has constantly got dots spilled everywhere. My friends call me up and say, ‘I have a blue dot on my shoe, do you need me to bring it back?” Her art has not been retained to that work space, however, and has since been shown in galleries all over the world.  She also has a piece displayed in the “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” Museum in San Francisco, California.  One of her most recent exhibitions includes the 2011 unveiling of “The Wing,” a Silverstone car racing complex made for the Formula One racing drivers, to which Douthwaite has dedicated much of her work.  She was the only artist to be invited to the reception. When considering that Nikki Douthwaite works in a medium many people would just throw in the trash, her accomplishments become that much more impressive.  The artist not only masterfully transforms the hole puncher into an instrument for art, but has garnered worldwide success based on her understanding of the greats before her.  Like her 19^th century inspiration, it may not be long before critics too recognize the artist in a class of her own.

– Melissa Cruz