'Research for me starts with the body': Meet Honours (Visual Art) graduate Nicole Goode

Nicole Goode and I are at the 2024 Grad Show, sitting on the grind rail she had made in the metal workshop, as part of her final Honours work.

She used the grind rail as the site for a durational performance during the Grad Show.

Nicole studied a Bachelor of Performing Arts in Western Australia in 2013. Since then, she has had a career as a freelance performer and performance maker, moving to Melbourne in 2018.

"There was a point where I found that I was collaborating predominantly with visual artists and making work in that context as opposed to in theatre."

“It was obvious I was loving the visual arts language and felt like we understood each other,” she said.

One of Nicole's mentors in performance was internationally renowned director, performer and singer Joanna Dudley. Nicole had done some assistant directing with Joanna at ACMI and also in Singapore. It was at the Singapore International Festival of Arts where Nicole really had the opportunity to immerse herself in the world of visual arts and considered applying for Honours in Visual Art at the VCA.

“Cate [Considine] sent me a list of potential supervisors to go through. I didn’t know anyone personally, so I was just going off what I found online and came up with a shortlist. And then from there she placed me with someone.”

The Honours year gave Nicole the time and space to think about the themes she was interested in and how she might integrate all the knowledge and language she had gained in the performing arts, into the field of visual art.

She started the year in the metal workshop.

“I was heating and hammering  a two meter piece of angled steel and became interested in how long it would take me to flatten out this piece of metal as a durational, repetitive task.”

While learning the techniques of metal work, she became more interested in the site of the workshop as a space of making , than in the sculptures produced.

“The whole time I just wanted to drape my body over the anvil and to be soft in that space and those sites that I grew up around, that I hadn’t been allowed into.”

“Here at the VCA, the metal workshop is the most welcoming space ever, but although the context is extremely different from the regional industrial sheds I grew up around, my body still carries biases and a learned choreography from those spaces.”

Nicole grew up in a remote town in Queensland, with a brother who is a metal worker.

"Walking past the skate park near my girlfriend’s apartment, the feeling my body holds reminds me of the metal workshop. There, my body has an unconscious choreography and I attempted to learn a new one by allowing myself to be shaped by the space.”

“Rather than learn to skate or move quickly through, I pause and attempt to fall slowly.”

Nicole Goode with grad show work Linger: Bank Ramp. Image by Sarah Hall. 

The Grad Show exhibited Nicole’s durational video work Linger (Bank Ramp) which depicts Nicole falling extremely slowly down the bank ramp at the Greensborough skate park.

Nicole says the opportunity to delve into research was one of the main reasons she was interested in pursuing Honours. Her research included reading the work of theorists such as Sara Ahmed, Jack Halberstam, Lee Edelman, and artists who deal with choreopolitics, such as Maria Hassabi, Kennedy Yanko, Ōta Shōgo and others. But research during Visual Arts Honours is also practice-led.

"This year I've expanded what research means for me. Research for me starts with the body,” she said.

"At the start of the year I was exploring the relationship between material and the body and was looking at how I might create choreography onto a piece of steel or understand the materiality of steel in my body.”

To accompany Nicole’s steel, video and performance works, she wrote a thesis entitled, “Slow bodies, fast sites: performing vulnerability in hyper masculine coded sites. ”

She credits her relationship with her lecturers, supervisor, and the broader cohort as having expanded her language in the Visual Arts throughout the Honours year.

“For me it was very much about getting to know my cohort. I don't know if its always like this, but it’s felt really cohesive among the Honours students and everyone's been so generous sharing their knowledge with me this year.”

“It can even be a bit overwhelming sometimes – the influx of all this knowledge.”

“Everyone just really cares about their work - the staff and the students are very grounded, and know what they care about,” she said.

Over the next year Nicole intends to expand on the work she explored in her Honours.

See more of Nicole Goode’s work here: @_nicolegoode