Nicola Yeoman’s hand-built typographic sculptures are for real

Nicola Yeoman’s childhood spent growing up on a farm in North Yorkshire is a big influence on her work: the dens she made in barns are still evident in her work today as she builds sets that range from elaborate interiors, to junk yard sculptures and ethereal and dreamlike worlds. Yeoman moved to London in 2001 and worked at the Guardian as a picture editor whilst studying furniture at Guildhall University. Her combined love of photography and her practical skills as a designer led to an accidental career as a set designer. Today she is an artist using a wide array of different materials as well as everyday and discarded objects to come up with installations that are pretty stunning, if not brilliant.

Whether built in trees or industrial interior spaces her work is built to specific vantage points, play with perspective and always have hidden surprises, stories and details entwined. For her ‘Circles’ series, Yeoman created several temporary installations inside an apparently abandoned industrial space, all with the basic shape of the circle as a starting point. Of a more cinematic scale is Yeoman’s ‘And Then’ series, set in a misty forest where dream-like scenes occur like twisted images out of a fantasy novel. But what really caught our attention is her letter-shaped series of works.

Yeoman’s ‘Alphabetical’ are again photographs of temporary installations: by sculpturally arranging objects such as chairs or dozens of scissors, she creates a visual illusion of the letter she wants to depict that is only visible from a specific angle. In the same vein, for the work she has produced for the New York Times, Yeoman recreated the historic newspaper’s logo using different materials and objects.

Ever since her first public art installation, entitled Home, at the 2010’s London design festival, British set designer and visual artist Nicola Yeoman proves that she is a brilliant master in creating imagery which the viewer assumes is computer generated, only to realise that in actual fact she’s built them exactly as they appear. A woman that combines typographic elements with set design and photography for hand-built sculptures, Yeoman’s work has been featured on the front covers of publications such as New York Times magazine, Wallpaper* and Vogue and she recently designed on Jay-Z’s Blueprint album cover.

Nicola currently works on a broad range of projects that include her own artwork & installations as well as still life styling and set design for both editorial and advertising campaigns in which she has collaborated with photographers including Dan Tobin Smith, Toby McFarlan Pond, Jenny Van Sommers, Mario Testino, Sam Taylor Wood, Miles Aldridge, Steve Harries, Jo Metson Scott and Kate Jackling.