Flights of Fancy
Through a medley of media, textile artist Nicola Henley creates evocative portrayals of the natural world, capturing its breathtaking beauty, liberty and continuity, discovers Marie Kelly.
Nicola Henley’s rural farmhouse and garden studio in the west of Ireland give her the space, surroundings and serenity she needs to pursue her nature-based textile art. Despite growing up in Bristol, Nicola was encouraged as a child to go out into the countryside and observe her environment. “My mum was brought up in idyllic times, walking country lanes in Devon and Cornwall, and she instilled in us an amazing love of the colours, smells and sounds of the countryside,” she says.
Nicola’s mum was also a keen bird watcher and her older brother was a member of an ornithological club at school so all three often went outside with binoculars, identifying species like green woodpeckers and nuthatches. It inspired a passion for birds and flying that was cemented when Nicola’s father took her hot-air ballooning as a child. “I remember being at my happiest,” she recalls, “and the idea of flying — of being free — has remained really strong within me,” she says.
Nicola has built a successful art practice around this passion. She creates large-scale wall hangings for private commissions and galleries, using a medley of media, inspired by the landscape and featuring her signature bird motifs. “I never get tired of birds,” she explains. “They move without borders. They navigate the width of the earth. It’s profound.”
Nicola studied Fine Art and Textiles at Goldsmiths University in the 1980s, but it was a trip to Cape Clear Island, off the coast of Co Cork in Ireland, the summer before her final year that decided her artistic direction. “It’s famous for migratory birds and there’s an observatory there,” Nicola explains. “It was a strange thing, but when I arrived in that landscape and began watching the birds, I suddenly realized everything about this combination inspired me.”
Today, Nicola lives in a 19th-century farmhouse in Co Clare, once used by a local farmer to house cattle. When she and her then-husband first saw the property, it was derelict and had a cattle crush at the front of the house. What’s more, it wasn’t on the market, but Nicola immediately fell in love with it. “This is the house I’m going to live in,” she promised herself.
She “gently cajoled” the owner — now a good friend — into selling and embarked on a sensitive restoration of the farmhouse and an adjacent barn, which became her studio for a time. “But there was never really enough light in the barn, and it had cold stone floors,” she explains. Today, she works from a light-flooded, timber-framed building in her garden with views of the Slieve Bearnagh mountains to the front and hens busily clucking about to the rear. “As an artist, I have always loved the wildness of Ireland,” she says.
The wildness of Ballinskelligs in Co Kerry provides much of the inspiration for her preparatory sketching. “I spend a lot of time at Cill Rialaig Arts Centre, drawing and sketching to create a body of work on paper that I can bring back to my studio,” Nicola explains. Her maternal grandfather was an architect with Wills Tobacco in Bristol and “an amazingly good drawer”. “He taught me to sharpen a pencil with a blade and showed me how you can change the way a pencil writes by the angle you put on the graphite. I still use that same technique today.”
I never get tired of birds. They move without borders. They navigate the width of the earth. It’s profound.
To create her multi-layered and process-heavy artworks, she begins with a large piece of calico, which she dyes, handpaints and screenprints. The calico is then hand washed to remove any chemical residue, dried, steamed and repainted to bolster the colours, which can lose their intensity at this point. “There’s a physicality to this side of the work, a rigorousness that’s extremely demanding,” she explains.
The next stage is more “meditative”. On an old domestic sewing machine, Nicola uses free motion stitching, whereby the needle behaves like a pen, to attach fragments of hand-printed Japanese paper, dyed muslin and swatches of silk. The final elements of this textural jigsaw puzzle can only be decided after the work has been viewed hanging on Nicola’s studio wall. “I will often stand on a ladder to get an overview of a piece on my worktop, but I always see things differently again once it’s hanging.”
The scale to which Nicola works is becoming more challenging as she gets older – her last commission was 120cm x 200cm. “The client wanted it to hang in a double-height space in their home so it was really very big.” Nicola is evolving her methods and themes to suit smaller-scale pieces. “I made some small works for an exhibition in Australia not long ago – a series of five little panels that can be hung together or individually – and they sold really well.”
Nicola recently formed a collective with three other women artists: a painter, sculptor and glass artist, all of whom are fascinated by the forces of nature and the natural world and she’s currently preparing for their upcoming group exhibition at The Kenny Gallery in Co Galway in September. “There’s a wonderful resonance when our pieces are together,” she explains.
Living and working in tandem with nature, Nicola describes her life in Co Clare as “everything I dreamed of”. She feels as happy and free now as she did on those hot-air balloon rides with her father many years ago.
Nicola runs studio courses throughout the year from her Co Clare studio. Find out more at nicolahenley.com.
This article was originally published in Image Period Living, August 2026