Alive With Ghosts
Installation view of Nickola Pottinger: fos born, 2025. Image courtesy of The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and the artist. Photo: Olympia Shannon.
At The Aldrich, a pretty picture won’t cut it. The museum backs artists ready to step onto an institutional stage. Since appointing Amy Smith-Stewart as Chief Curator in 2022, The Aldrich has built a reputation for rigor and surprise. Resisting institutional safe bets, Smith-Stewart leans into curatorial risk with shows that challenge and haunt. Smith-Stewart told me she is interested in “spotlighting stories that have gone untold, or have been erased . . . as an educational institution, we have a responsibility,” she quipped. It is in this spirit that the museum presents Fos Born, the first museum solo exhibition of Nickola Pottinger. The show unsettles boundaries of subject and object, human and nonhuman, positioning Pottinger as one of the most compelling artists of her generation.
Pottinger’s work traverses four galleries, where earth-toned pulp, glints of gold, teal shadowings, and rhythmic incisions establish a visual and material language. Her sculptures, which she calls “duppies,” a Jamaican patois term for ghosts, are primarily formed with pigmented paper pulp produced with her mother’s handheld mixer. Acting as an archivist of her Jamaican lineage, Pottinger collects heirlooms, toys, hair clips, and other tactile remnants from her visits to her family home in Jamaica. These objects are lodged into the paper pulp alongside casts of her own body. Her duppies resonate with a spectral charge, insisting on reverence and deep listening from the viewer.
Nickola Pottinger: Mumma, 2023. Paper pulp, pigments, oil pastel, and teeth, 37 × 12 × 10 in. Courtesy of the artist, © Nickola Pottinger. Photo: Olympia Shannon.
Pottinger’s work functions as living matter, a presence between here, then, and now. Mumma (2023) postures itself as part human, part ancestor, part unknown, yet here the human form is more explicit: rounded hips, breasts, a discernible head. These anatomical cues are not rendered with a smooth verisimilitude but a textured grotesquerie, possessing them with an eerie, otherworldly presence. Raspberry pink, blue, and green pigments trace out her crown, mouth, ear, breasts, nipples, and belly button, mapping her body like a spiritual diagram. Two adjacent sets of teeth are positioned near the womb—a reinterpretation of a vagina dentata. Within the womb it bides more so with the cyclical pull of motherhood, the act of giving and consuming, the constant gnawing and chewing. Her fixation on teeth is both personal and cultural; her mother once worked in a dental lab, and in Jamaican folklore, the loss of teeth in dreams often foretells death.
Edging from the teeth, a stroke of red pigment travels down the leg, reading as both wound and pathway. In this arrangement, Pottinger’s sculpture begins to enact what Sylvia Wynter names as the necessity of unsettling the colonial category of the human.[1] The teeth also recall Hortense Spillers’s distinction between body and flesh, where the history of slavery ungendered Black women, fragmenting them from kinship.[2] Against this history, Pottinger’s duppies reimagine Black women as loved, sacred, and infinite: adorned guardians and preservers. Simultaneously, her work urges viewers to confront their own ties to the past.
This reconstitution is made possible through Pottinger’s approach to assemblage. By fusing body casts, heirlooms, pulp, and furniture, the line between object and subject collapses in front of us. In Memba wen wi did young (2023), a bench becomes a convening of presences: multiple figures’ heads protrude from its back, while smaller heads are sequenced together horizontally between its beams. The composition feels at once hierarchical and ritual—a gathering of minds. Objects placed along the seat suggest an offering, referencing Jamaican folklore that Pottinger overheard as a child.
Nickola Pottinger, Alvernia prep school, 2023. Paper pulp, yagua, pigments, oil pastel, gold leaf, and paper clips, 59 × 13 × 17½ in. Courtesy of the artist, © Nickola Pottinger. Photo: Olympia Shannon.
Pottinger’s use of assemblage is formal and also ontological. Like Betye Saar, she fuses metaphor through object, but rather than subverting found objects, Pottinger’s family furniture and embedded matter feel inseparable from the larger story. A yagua leaf sprouts from a school chair in Alvernia prep school (2023), while casts of feet anchor the form to the floor. Here, furniture ceases as a passive support and transmutes to a co-conspirator, collapsing distinctions between human form, domestic object, and spiritual vessel.
The hybrid form advances her use of assemblage toward a posthumanist reality, proposing an unfixed subjecthood. Pottinger’s sculptures are neither strictly figurative nor abstract, neither human nor fully object, but sites of possibility. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, who critiques posthumanist rhetoric that treats hybridity as speculative, feels poignant for Pottinger’s work. For Jackson, hybridity, fragmentation, and material entanglement are “historical conditions” of Black life. Pottinger materializes this reality in works like Smaddy (Animal) (2025), ol’hige (2023), and Cry blood (2025), which lean into the categorization of animal/sphinx yet have a human head, hair, and/or feet, pushing beyond existing manifestations.
This argument crystallizes in fos born (2025), created while Pottinger was pregnant with her daughter Zora. Here, hybridity is doubled: sculpture and child, ancestor and descendant, fragment and coherence. The massive sculpture anchors the exhibition, two conjoined figures with large eyes positioned over casts of her breasts, a close-eyed head at the center seemingly in another dimension. Pottinger’s drawing and layering of pigment become more foreboding, as line and color thread between casts of her hands, breasts, and feet. Childhood hair ornamentation forms a crown, while hands cradle the cast of her pregnant belly. Fos born is saturated with care and vulnerability.
Nickola Pottinger, Give tanks and praises, 2025. Paper Pulp, Wood, Polyurethane, Hair Clips, Gold Leaf, 44 x 30 x 26 in. Courtesy of the artist, © Nickola Pottinger. Photo: Olympia Shannon.
Wandering through The Aldrich, the devotion Pottinger pours into her work is palpable. Zora, present at the opening dressed in all white and a white lace bonnet, seemed to double the resonance of the show, as Give tanks and praises (2025) already carries her presence within it. The sculpture rests in a quiet space, a single light illuminating the cast of Pottinger’s very pregnant belly, the floor softened with sand. It feels as though a version of Zora’s own past has been given her own room in the museum. Viewers cannot enter but must look from behind a rope, which heightens the sacred distance. The sculpture again leans on assemblage: a chair anchored by casts of Pottinger’s feet, raw, exposed bone forming the shins. Behind the chair, two heads are positioned out of sight, unseen unless one could cross the threshold. It is a fitting metaphor for Pottinger’s practice: so much of its depth remains inaccessible to those outside Jamaican culture. That opacity is not an absence but a power. Pottinger refuses visibility, and in that refusal, her work finds its sharpest edge.
Installation view of Nickola Pottinger: fos born, 2025. Image courtesy of The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and the artist. Photo: Olympia Shannon.
Nickola Pottinger: fos born is on view at The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art from June 8, 2025, through January 11, 2026.
[1] Sylvia Winter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 257–337.
[2] Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 64–81.
