A Window To Swim Through

Nicole Steenhof (b. 1990) is a visual artist currently working with oil painting and post consumer sculpture based in Shoalwater, WA. Completing post-graduate studies with distinction in Fine Arts at Curtin University in 2024, Steenhof has since had multiple works acquired by public collections including John Curtin Gallery and the City of Melville. She has been a finalist in many art awards throughout WA, including Mandorla Art Award and Castaways Sculpture Awards, and won Emerging Artist at Royal Prize for Landscape award in 2024.

Swimming in the ocean through the seasons has given me an appreciation for all of the different qualities each day brings – the same ocean is new every time. It has helped me find an embodied way of painting the ocean. The paintings have ribbons not only of dark and light, but of shape formed by colour. Oil paint is applied and removed, allowing the underpainting to gleam through, much like the water is understood by its opaque reflection of the sky and also its transparent substance. The paintings mimic the way the ocean shifts, disappears, reappears.

Through swimming, you experience a sense of one’s own wateriness and a fading of boundaries between the depth beneath, the reflection of the sky, and between bodies of water (yourself and the sea). The title of the collection is based on a resolution to a dream that my daughter had, where the ocean filled our home and yet it didn’t matter to my daughter who said she found ‘a window to swim through’. It’s my hope that these paintings function in a similar way, that the paintings of the ocean become a window to swim through, a portal of freedom.