ABSTRACT
What lessons about listening as an ethical relation are offered by Nicodemus? What visual and oral language does she draw on to listen to and represent what has previously been left unrepresented? And what insights does Nicodemus offer educators about negotiating the complex subjectivities of the listener while listening to stories of anguish and loss? Nicodemus listens to and then (re)creates testimony in her series “Birth Masks” by producing a meta-netting of the canvas intertwined with thread that she describes as
“internetting” (Artist statement). Intentionally playing with the notion of a global internet, internetting refers
to the haptic, textile creation of webs and layers which emerge as a series of layered testimonies and sites of memory that re-externalize the events of loss and mourning for her unborn children. Her testimony to this loss is placed outside herself but literally contained and shielded within the textures of this painting.
