Feminine Africa Voices – Nicola

Feminine Africa Voices: Nicola Lazenby | Artist

This is my exhibition of my new collection of artworks, called “Lulama”, which means wolf woman, and the reason I started creating this work was because I came back from a four-month pilgrimage, walking in the wild. I was doing a section of the Pacific Crest Trail, which runs from Mexico to Canada and I was gone for four months, and I came back and this art just wanted to be made. Part of it was this strong urge to express the wild woman and the wild woman was the reason I went hiking. I think it is something that has been in me for a very long time. When I was little, I spent a huge amount of time in wild spaces, in the garden, on my own, with my sibling, and as I got older it became a relationship that was more and more estranged. As I neared 30, I realised that I needed some kind of initiation into womanhood and it was missing in my life, and that yearning came to me in the form of, I would long for mountainscapes, unnamed mountainscapes. They were in my dreams and my imaginings. I would have strange dreams of animals. I would have the desire to sell everything, quit my job, cut all ties and just have a backpack and a good pair of shoes and just leave. And this became an urge that was stronger and stronger. And then I came into the book, “Women who run with Wolves”, and that was just this immense awakening for me, that just gave language and poetry to this really luminous experience that I was having. I felt it was almost being channeled through me, this desire for the wild woman. I think the author, Clarissa Pinkola Estés…