“You look like somebody threw you away,” artist Nikii Richey’s mother said to her in passing when she was young.
“I’ve never forgotten that,” Richey says. “She probably didn’t even know she ever said that and probably would have denied it if I ever brought it up, but the way she reacted to me was always centered around my looks and how I looked.”
Richey’s relationship with her mother was tense, to say the least. “She had a lot of her own struggles,” Richey says. “She was an alcoholic, smoked her whole life, probably undiagnosed bipolar.” So, when Richey had the opportunity to attend college in South Carolina, she left her Mississippi hometown and estranged herself from her mom.
But, in the last five years of her mother’s life, Richey assumed the role of caretaker and brought her mom to Memphis, her home for the past 20 or so years. During that time, Richey says, “we were able to reconcile, and I was able to understand where all of that came from. It was passed down from her mother.”
Richey’s mother — Retta — grew up in the ’50s and ’60s as a bona fide beauty queen. “I was reading some letters that her mother wrote to her in college,” Richey says, “and it was all about the next beauty contest and what dress she was going to wear and what they were going to do with her hair, and it was never how are you, how are your classes.” That focus on beauty never left Retta. She was married to her second husband for a year, Richey says, and he never saw her without makeup on.
Retta passed away a little over two years ago, and a year later, Richey knew that she had to make something, to move her hands. “I just thought to myself, I’m gonna make this big braid,” she says. “I was thinking about my mother and her fixing my hair and pulling it through a cap and frosting it when I was 7 years old. I just quieted my mind and let my emotions take control of my hands. I followed my intuition.”
That intuition led Richey to creating the works in her latest show, “A Come Apart.” “That’s something else my mother would say: ‘I’m just having a come apart,’” she says. “It’s a mental state phrase — when things get to be a little too much, and you have to ‘take to the bed.’”
In this show, Richey plays with the comfort of old linens in her sculptures, but then she pokes and bends wires through them and sprays those wires with vinegar to rust them from the inside out. “If my intuition tells me to take out a blow torch and burn it,” she says, “that’s what I do, and I see what happens after that. Maybe I need to burn it, so I can repair it.” And she might bleach the fabric; she might wax it; she might dye it or add makeup or spray it with hair spray; she might stretch it out and pull it back with ribbon.
“All those treatments represent what women do to their bodies,” she says. “I like to play with the difference between the way that trauma leaves scars behind and how we still try to be pretty through all of life’s trauma instead of just being. … I think about women and their bodies and their stresses a lot, so that definitely plays into my work [outside the studio], too.”
In 2015, Richey co-founded Sister Supply, which supplies pads and tampons to menstruators in need, and currently, she is designing the interiors of Hub Hotel, a new transitional housing space for women, which she says will include a salon to provide “luxury, comfort, and safety for these women.” But, she ponders, “What’re the social implications of needing to have your hair and nails done to feel good about yourself as a woman, even after all they’ve been through?”
“That’s the basis of this show — this forced societal and motherly demand for beauty and display,” she adds. “And every single piece in this show I can relate back to my mother.”
“A Come Apart” is on display at the Medicine Factory through November 28th, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 9 a.m.-2 p.m. Call 484-6154 for entry.