Interview with Lana Nichols
Artist’s Portrait at the Baltic Degree Show, 2026
Can you share a little bit about yourself and your practice?
My name is Lana, I’m 22 and I’m an artist and photographer from North East England. I grew up always having a passion for creating and studied art throughout my education, eventually graduating from university with a First Class degree in Fine Art (2026). Throughout my journey, memory and nostalgia have become reoccurring themes, with feminism starting to play a bigger part in my work. My time spent creating has led me to discover my practice in the world of the vintage family photographs and embroidery.
Domesticity, 2024
Photo from Lana Nichol’s Family Archive
When/how did you begin working with vintage photographs? What is their significance within your work?
It was during my studies at university when I first began looking into the family archive. My previous works often explored my childhood through photographs and memories of myself as I grew up in the 2000’s. I have always been fascinated with the past and find it amazing how photography has allowed us to capture and store memories of so long ago.
This was until I discovered my Grandma had boxes and boxes full of old photographs I never knew she had! I began to find late 19th century Carte De Visites, early 20th century postcards, mid-late 20th century Kodachrome slides and I even found some Daguerreotype/ Albumen glass plates! The archive of my family consists of photographs from every era, starting from 1890 all the way up to today!
My projects then began to explore these photographs with the first project exploring snapshots and domesticity through the years. My second project explored the materiality of photographs and the takeover of digital images.
My latest project ‘Lifting the Veil’ (2026), gratefully published in Issue 20 of Photo Trouvée Magazine, explored deeper into the embroidery side of my work. My Grandma taught me to knit and sew when I was a child and although I used embroidery in the first project it wasn’t until my second project of using vintage family photographs that I really started to shift towards embroidery as a key element in my work. ‘Lifting the Veil’ was the project that helped me identify where my practice was headed. It was shown at ‘BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art’, Gateshead UK (2026), for my university degree show, and consists of 32 vintage family photographs of women in my family from 1920-1950, all hand embroidered and explored embroidery and it’s feminine stereotype, completed with the suffragette flag colours embroidered into wooden frames.
Artworks from Lifting the Veil Series
What themes are you exploring within your work?
My practice has explored many themes, but those that are constantly reappearing within my work are memory, family, feminism, gender roles and appreciation. Working with vintage photographs of my family, I recognise the photograph and its physicality. Our world today is so set on digitalising anything it can and we are rapidly losing our physical family photographs and albums. I work with images of the women in my family in particular, and use embroidery as a feminist tool to explore its gender stereotype, while appreciating each woman depicted in each photograph and using what freedom I have today to free them from a time in history filled with oppression and zero recognition for their art.
Photo from Lana Nichol’s Family Archive
Do you work with found photographs or family archives? If you work with both, do you have a different relationship to the pieces while creating them?
So far in my practice I have only worked with my own family archive. I am extremely lucky to have photographs from as early as 1890 to today’s modern images.
I have always been fascinated with history and photography and so having this family archive is very special to me. I am constantly in awe of these photos every time I look at them and being able to cherish and share them in the form of art is a wonderful experience. I have began to collect found photographs that I have discovered hidden away in charity and antique shops and I am looking to work with these in the future and see what I can create with photographs of people i do not know- photographs that have lost their home but not their importance as historical family artefacts.
Digital Pixels, 2024
Playing House, 2025
