By Mackenzie Beirnes-Daniels

Third year Fanshawe Fine Art student Nicole Hill on nostalgia, farm life, and the conception of her first solo exhibition Preserves.

Note: This article was originally written in April 2025. Nicole has now graduated Fanshawe with her Advanced Diploma in Fine Art and has just debuted a collaboration with the Young Free Press and The Horton Market you can view here!

Outside the studio walls sits an isolated strip of blue and white wallpaper, pinstripes climbing upwards from a faux baseboard, and an old country pine side table. It’s materials from a recent installation of a small scene, one seemingly cut right out of Country Living Magazine and collaged next to the entryway of the cubicle. Within the studio, the walls are decorated with photographs and paintings of rural life.

Nicole Hill, a fellow class of 2025 Fanshawe Fine Art student, hails from Thorndale, a village made up of roughly 1,000 residents just outside of London Ontario (“behind the airport,” she specifies to me, as I hadn’t heard of the place before). She grew up on a multigenerational farm, showing me photos from decades ago and explaining all the ways the family home has changed over the years.

Nicole just wrapped up an exhibition in Siskind, titled Preserves – a folksy curation of readymades and paintings that immediately triggers an overwhelming sense of nostalgia and familiarity, whether for your grandparents or whoever; you’ve certainly felt like you’ve been here before.

Readymades have been a new thing for Nicole. Before the third year of Fanshawe, where students are guided to develop their own cohesive body of work over the two terms, access to more space and resources has her going beyond the canvas and into building a more immersive, conceptual space to tell her story – bridging the gap between the tradition of folk art and fine art. “It’s interesting, seeing what is and isn’t considered art,” she says about the rustic shelf display featured in Preserves. However, unlike Duchamp, the father of readymades, Nicole isn’t interested in mass production or manufacturing. The history of the object is what matters. Her mother collects antiques – and there’s pieces of furniture that have been in the family for generations. The way wood weathers and metals oxidize, documenting the passage of time is what interests her.

She brings up the corporatization of the farming industry, how not only can it push small local farmers out of business, but also how we lose the heritage, community and culture around family farming. “I think it’s cool, when people want the cottage-core aesthetic,” Nicole says, referencing the increasingly popular shift towards collecting vintage and nostalgia. It could be that with fast fashion, quick trend turnover, and the globalization of everything, people are craving authenticity.

One piece in particular stands out, a setup of the end of a dining room table, the table set for dinner and garnished with flowers. A chair pulled out is empty, but the dirty ball cap hung on the back makes you think of a dad, coming in from a long day toiling the fields, for dinner prepared by his wife. It opens up an interesting conversation on traditional gender roles in rural life – but for Nicole, it’s more so about depicting her life honestly. “There’s a lot of ways to look at my work,” she clarifies. “But you see nowadays, girls are offering to take over the farms when their parents retire.” She shares how everybody helps out, both domestically and when it comes to farm labour. Not interested in making any absolute criticisms on the matter, she explores the nuance of tradition, and emphasizes that pieces she exhibits are not always artifacts of a lost past, but instead just snapshots of her and many other farmers’ everyday life.

As she contemplates the next steps in her career, Nicole’s hoping to return to photography and watercolours. She considers commission-based work aimed towards other homesteaders. “People often ask for paintings of their tractors, or drone shots of their fields. Farmers are pretty sentimental people.”

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Nicole Hill is a recent 2025 Fanshawe Fine Art graduate and previously graduated from the Fanshawe Photography program in 2019. Art has always been a passion of hers since she was young, and currently she is primarily a painter and photographer. She grew up on a multi-generation farm just outside of London Ontario. This upbringing has inspired much of her work to be focused around agriculture and the close rural communities around Southern Ontario. Follow Nicole at @hill.paintings or via her website.

Mackenzie Beirnes-Daniels is a multidisciplinary artist based in London, Ontario. After studying Fine Art at Fanshawe College, she now practices at Good Sport studio and gallery, creating drawings as a means of exploring form, memory, and material. Follow Mackenzie at @s0nicdist0rti0n