Nora Curiston is a visual artist living and working in Carmi, British Columbia.
A self-proclaimed ‘late bloomer’, she graduated from Vancouver’s Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2007 at the age of 55.
Curiston began her schooling at Emily Carr as a largely self-taught painter desiring some hardnosed technical training as well as input from other artists. Once at school she gravitated towards sculpture and installation work and credits artist and instructor Liz Magor as having a major influence on her artistic development.
The little town of Wells, B.C. has also played an important role in Curiston’s career. She won a scholarship to attend the Toni Onley Artist Project in the summer of 2008. At the Project a group of artists worked under the mentorship of David T. Alexander and Peter von Thiesenhausen. Von Thiesenhausen was particularly supportive of her sometimes difficult and quirky sculptures and she has since returned to Wells to create several permanent outdoor installations.
Curiston has participated in group and solo shows throughout the interior of British Columbia and has work in private and public collections in Canada and the United States.
ARTIST STATEMENT
To me art operates somewhere in the realm of magic. It proposes things that might not otherwise be possible or even considered.
My work is conceptual in nature and can demand a lot of the viewer. Often I will present a simple coupling of items and a title. One definition of conceptual art is work in which the concept is more important than the actual object. My project is to create art in which both the object and the concept are important and ultimately work that makes it worth any effort, on the part of the viewer, to make the journey.