"Illusion: Polar Bear" Print

Trace Nichols is a contemporary photographer, printmaker, and educator with a passion for expressing the inferred within her subjects. Her art often seeks to cultivate conversations between her viewers, the medium used, the production processes, and the subjects expressed. Trace’s artistic focus merges conceptual inquires and a contemporary use of alternative processes, with the arts of photography and printmaking. With this integration she strives to draw inspiration and technique from the past, to help form new conversations around our current visual and intellectual experience of the photograph and of the print.

Rarely does her work cease at a single capture. Trace often takes the approach that building layers of context through working in series form or by developing more complex individual images, that an enriched experience can transpire, leaving a deeper impart.

Trace has been working in the visual field for over 20 years. Her works have been exhibited in such institutions as the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers Bankside Gallery in London, Aspen Art Museum, Boca Raton Museum of Art, Brevard Art Museum, and The Red Brick Arts Center among others, as well as being housed in private collections throughout the United States. She also co-chairs the Aspen Art Museum’s Contemporaries program.

Trace was born in Coral Gables, Florida, in 1970, and currently resides in Aspen, Colorado. She received her B.S. degree in studio art from Florida State University and her M.F.A. in photography from the Academy of Art University. She has been an instructor at the Academy of Art University since 2009, teaching for the graduate photography program.

Through her efforts, Trace has made significant strides advancing the contemporary practice of photogravure using polymer plates in a direct-image-to-plate application. Her methods of production employ the use of SolarPlates, Akua water-based etching inks, and other materials that allow the complete process to remain a non-toxic one, creating a safer and healthier studio environment.