Brancolini Grimaldi is pleased to announce Terrain, a new body of work by Jackie Nickerson. The series is an investigation into labour and agricultural environments in sub-Saharan Africa.

Agriculture is an integral component of African daily life, shaping culture and society. Whilst Nickerson’s earlier work in Africa, Farm, concentrated on how individual identity is made through improvisation, Terrain takes a broader view, focusing on the synergy between cultivation, workers and environment.

The result is a new kind of portraiture that steps away from photojournalism, refusing to merely illustrate statistics and moral indignation. Terrain instead employs a reduced artistic language to draw attention to important debates around crop specialisation, subsistence farming and food security.

Terrain renders human labour in its most fundamental form and documents the workers in their environment and how their labour inevitably leaves traces on the natural world, transforming and altering the landscape.

“Terrain is about us in the landscape, how we change the world we inhabit at every moment of our being human, and how, for better and for worse, the world that we make, in turn, changes who we are.” - Jackie Nickerson

A monograph of Terrain will be released by TF Editores later this year.

Jackie Nickerson was born in the USA. Her work has been exhibited in many venues including the Museum of Modern Art, Salzburg; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; National Portrait Gallery, London; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Harn Museum, Gainesville; Vatican Museums, Rome. Her work is held in many public and private collections including MoMA, NY; Vatican Museums, Rome and the National Gallery of Ireland.