In her undergraduate studio at the University of Georgia, 2025.
Loneliness and wonder expanded into a rich spectrum of feelings. A never-ending sense of nostalgia. An inconsolable yearning for a realm just beyond my reach. My experiences became framed on both ends by the bittersweet inkling that every moment is as beautiful and significant as it is fleeting and inconsequential. The hazy reflection on a window, the olive-colored water of the river that flows through my hometown, eyes when they look away, the passing of another year, a hand held warm in the snow, the world of communication possible in the unspoken, the spiral shape that decorates seashells and informs our unconscious ideas of beauty. An infinitude of things to notice and attempt to understand, coming together as one incomprehensible mystery. My singular, time-bound experience doesn’t know what to make of it—how to hold all of it—while accepting that I will only ever know a tiny fragment of what it means to be here.
And so I paint, and I drink coffee, and I admire the way light passes through things.
My desire to make meaning, to see everything as connected to something else, to find solace in nature and comfort in solitude—it’s an act of hope. Hope that I might overcome moments of loneliness or doubt by noticing a current running through the things and people around me. It is a choice, a truth I want to see, and thus I seek it out and continue to find it. Through curious walks, through listening to music, through mixing colors, and through embracing sudden gushes of sentimentality.
This is the magic I saw when I was young, though I had a different name for it then.
Nicole Ganelin (b. 2002)
I spent much of my childhood in that quiet space between loneliness and wonder. I believed I was a fairy, meant to perch on flower petals and use a wand to make my wishes come true—a sister exactly my age, a pair of gossamer wings, a tiny house in the woods with someone living inside. Magic was always there for me to uncover, hidden behind the thin veil of my desire for it to be real, and my will to make it a reality.
Over the years, that desire for magic was channelled into art-making.