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I’m Nick Cave,
artist,
live and work in Chicago.
Nick
is such a fabulous artist.
He is a fashion designer,
he is a sculptor,
he is a dance and performance artist.
He is working with
60 dancers,
100 musicians
and 200 students
in the College of Visual Arts and Design,
to provide the performance of
a piece that’s going to take place in March.
We are so excited.
There’s been a longstanding interest at UNT to work with Nick.
He started his graduate studies
here at UNT
in the mid-80s.
So it’s an alumnus coming back to the university.
[laughs] I’m super-excited!
I’m so excited that Nick Cave is here.
Nick Cave has been here twice this semester
and he’ll back in the spring,
and I’ve gotten to engage with him and do hands-on demos with him
and chat with him about his process and how he works with his graduate students.
Nick Cave has a wide variety of different types of work,
but the work that he’s probably most famous for would be the series of Soundsuits.
And the Soundsuits are a sculpture that’s worn on the body
and is composed of hundreds, maybe thousands, of pieces
that are attached to an armature that goes over the body
and can function just as a sculpture
or also can be performed with a dancer
or even with Nick Cave himself
inside of the suit moving around and animating the sculpture.
What’s really exciting for us here is
we certainly haven’t had this opportunity to work with an artist of that caliber
and across so many different departments.
We have the students in sculpture involved,
fabricating the armatures of the Soundsuits,
we have other students in the fibers department kind of
putting more of the fabric onto the armatures of the Soundsuit
as well as attaching raffia to garments that have been fabricated.
Outside of our college,
then it will move into working with the College of Music and the department of dance
as far as working out choreography and the musical pieces and compositions.
What’s special about Nick’s work is that
there are multiple ways into it
so that it can appeal broadly to a wide range of people and interests.
It’s beautiful,
it’s provocative.
The scale of it is more than human
and so we can relate to it with our bodies.
I love the work!
I think the Nick Cave collaboration
has just been a great experience so far for UNT.
I can’t wait to see the performance.
I know we all have it on our calendars,
waiting and ready to see it.
We’ve already got so many people in the Dallas and Fort Worth area
excited about the performance, being able to see it
and participate in it,
and we know you will too.