Edgy and inventive, Nina Fletcher’s innovative use of materials highlights the artistic possibilities of everyday objects. She creates works of astounding beauty from material as diverse as old clothes, shoes, handbags, wire, bones, buttons, and tissues.

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Over her decades-long career in art, Fletcher’s work frequently returns to images inspired by the body. By turns witty, humorous, and serious, her imagery speaks of the frailties of the body, the struggles to maintain a sense of dignity in the face of the daily onslaught of stress, wear and tear. These images of the body reveal compelling conceptual content, since they reflect the body’s status as a battleground of contested meanings. But Fletcher always remains alert to the humor of our own self-imposed burdens as well. In one of her sculptures, I’ll Just Grab My Bag, Nina approaches the handbag as a sculptural object. But this one is made of cement, contradicting the breezy sentiment of the title. The object makes you laugh, but she makes her point about self-imposed, unnecessary baggage we may unconsciously accept as a vital accessory.

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Fletcher casts her net wide too, there is an insistence on universality in her work. In a series of lead sculptures in the shape of different sized hearts, the soft lead is opened and bent back into delicate and jagged layers, laying the interior bare for the viewer’s gaze. She makes the vulnerability and pain that love may bring visible, tangible. Truly heavy hearts, in their open state they reveal an emptiness that we can all recognize and feel. The breadth of her thinking and inspiration is there too. The “Heart” Series is inspired by the ancient Persian poet Rumi: “The wound is the place where the light enters in.” We see, we understand, and we recognize ourselves in these mute objects.

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Her portraits and self-portraits exhibit an equally adventurous spirit. After learning that Polaroid film could be detached from its backing, she collaged photographs of her face together that suggest the multiple perspectives of seeing and understanding oneself as a complex, dynamic, ever-changing entity. Using the same method, she collaged images of her backbone together to suggest its fragile, complex properties that are subject to breakage. In a recent series of stunning portraits of friends and family, she made large-scale portraits out of strategically placed buttons that assemble into the pattern of lights and darks that render a face. Pixelated, impressionistic, Ethan or Guillio‘s Eyes snap into place and cohere as portraits as the viewer steps back from the surface. Up close, they are abstract arrangements of multicolored patches of high-keyed color that are just as interesting as the portrait itself. This tension between near and far, abstraction and realism, keeps the viewer transfixed.

Fletcher‘s background is as eclectic as her approach to materials. Born and raised in the Boston area, Fletcher left the area after college to volunteer with the Peace Corps, spending two years in Africa. When she returned, she became a nurse practitioner in California. It wasn‘t until she returned to her New England roots that Fletcher decided to pursue her innermost passion, art. Changing directions, she enrolled at the Massachusetts College of Art where she majored in painting. Later, she started and artist-run Blackstone Print Studio where she organized and conducted exhibits and workshops to highlight the work of the members of Blackstone Printers.

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Her work is well known throughout the region, and she has won numerous awards for her prints and sculptures.

With determination, wit and insight, Fletcher‘s imagination will continue to turn the ordinary objects around us into extraordinary objects worthy of aesthetic contemplation. In so doing, she demonstrates a sustained preference for the quirky, unexpected, and eccentric over the stuffy preciosity of tradition.

Her work will continue to delight us and alert us to the aesthetic potential of every moment.