Nicole Fedele

Nicole Fedele is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice refuses to stay in one lane. For years she worked in two worlds. The intimate, tactile world of handmade jewelry. The expansive, layered world of mixed media painting. She never wanted to give one up for the other. Her recent work is the result of that refusal.

She cuts steel freehand with a plasma cutter, coaxing ornate, delicate forms from industrial sheet metal and mounting them slightly raised above abstract painted wood panels. In strong light, the metal casts shadows onto the surface beneath it. Those shadows shift with the viewer. The work is never fully still.

The tension between what is covered and what is revealed is the territory she returns to again and again. Metal as armor. Metal as adornment. The ornate protecting the fragile. The industrial made delicate. What lies beneath can be distress. What lies beneath can be beauty. Often, it is both.

She is still experimenting, still pushing the boundary between disciplines, still finding out what the combination of materials and light will do.

BFA Pratt Institute, 2002

The Other Art Fair (LA Sept 2026) (Dallas May 2023)