Joe Nickerson, Folk Artist,
Kearns, Ontario.

Here is part of an email Peter Bikaunieks sent me in October, 2005, which neatly describes Joe Nickerson and his art.

" As promised, just a bit more on our visit to Kearns, Sept. 24/05. Nancy and I have been going up North to Kirkland Lake, Virginiatown, and Kearns for 20 years or more on 2- or 3-day driving excursions. . . . . We also visited Joe Nickerson that day. I met Joe last year on the same street in Kearns where I played with his brother 50 years ago. It's the street Joe has lived on all his life. This year Nancy and I spent a good hour and a half with him and bought a couple of pieces of his art work.

" Formerly a railway worker, Joe is retired and took up sculpture about 10 years ago. His medium is white PVC tubing. The exteriors of the two houses he owns -- the roofs and yards -- are festooned with larger than life figures of animals, prospectors, kids on snowboards, and characters out of fairy tales and dreams. Joe has converted one of the buildings into an art gallery. Both floors and every room, including the stairway, are crowded with his work. What's immediately striking is the difference between his exterior and interior pieces, which to my mind are more sophisticated and aesthetic. He has obviously progressed in ten years from the literalism of his early Mother Goose figures to greater abstraction as he explores ideas, emotions, and circumstances in his life. In a fair number of his pieces he incorporates what I would call found art, and even coloured bits of glass, to very attractive effect. Many of his forms are reminiscent of Star Wars figures. Clearly, white PVC, the colour of George Lucas's clone troopers, is Joe's metier. He does with it what poets do with words. And he's astonishingly prolific at it. For him it seems as natural as breathing good Northern air. "

Joe Nickerson, September 2005