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Niko Woron
They/Them/Theirs
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As a child I had no friends. My childhood was riddled with severe shyness, a pesky speech impediment, and an unhelpful shrink. What my mother didn’t realize is that even though I would not dare speak to my paste-eating, drooling, fellow classmates, I had instead befriended the abstract world embedded inside my own screwy head. I may have not fully developed speech, but I had my very own language in the marks, squiggles, drips, splashes, and doodles that I felt on the paper. Thousands of squiggles later, my tangled *Pinglish is somewhat improved and my shyness has faded just enough for me to allow myself to push myself to limits I previously thought impossible. Whatever becomes intertwined in my web of neurons, however bizarre, becomes a part of the rhetoric and translates into words anyone can make their own.
Since then, slang in the form of new mediums, has transformed the dead language into a contemporary dialect. Still wielding the root of the word, the suffixes and prefixes take form in digital, performance, sculpture, fibers, fashion, and film. Ex. sculpt-paint-film in conversation with fash-digi-perf; equating in an allegorical nonfiction in a physical installation. As I am constantly expanding, improving, improvising, destroying and conceptualizing, I have challenged my made up language to become physical scriptures in 3D space
Sketchbook
My sketchbook is my sanctuary. It’s where I play, create, destroy, experiment, journal, plan, collage, collab, and love and hate. You'll get my full life experience from the very first day COVID affected my life a little over a year ago. My soul is embedded in every page—I'm not holding back any of the nitty gritty, vulnerable drawings or writings. So, while you get to "flip" through my private sketchbook as you please, be careful with my heart, 'cuz you'll get a lot of it.
Workspace
Who knew my bathroom would be where I spend literally all my time? While it hurts not to have more space for my chaotic practice, I've learned to make my controlled chaos in this space as well as my alternate space (my digi niko world).
About the Guild
The RISD Museum Guild is a group of undergraduate students from local colleges and universities who work toward representation, inclusion, and advocacy for student voices in the museum space. We typically plan and facilitate public programs that allow artists from local colleges to share their processes. During the pandemic, the RISD Museum Guild has had to adjust our modes of working collaboratively. Like you, we squished our faces into a shifting mosaic of Zoom rectangles, with members calling in from Providence, New Orleans, New Delhi, London, and more. Unravel: An Anti-Exhibition has grown out of this shared virtual space.
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