Art Student Profile: Rendering nostalgia and comfort

Nora Nuzzolo, a fourth-year art student, takes a novel approach to her material, both subject matter and physical medium. She is a printmaker with a focus in relief printing and botanical and floral imagery, “flowers, and the things to put them in,” she said.

Since starting with papermaking last year, she even makes her own paper out of recycled materials. Nuzzolo learned to make her own paper in Professor Barbara Pagh’s class, and she has added her own elements by incorporating flowers to the paper she creates. With this unique approach, Nuzzolo’s medium has come to reflect the subject of her prints.

When it came to expressing herself as a child, “it was easier for me to draw than it was to write,” she said. That passion and natural ability in art carried through her entire school career, but she tried to go in a different direction after arriving at URI.

“I started as a nursing student…but it wasn’t gratifying,” Nuzzolo said. “Then I switched back to art after trying a couple of other majors. I just loved the freedom that art classes gave me.”

After enrolling in URI’s art program, it took a while for Nuzzolo to find her own preferred style and medium. She discovered printmaking when she came to the art department.

“I needed something new to do,” Nuzzolo said. “It really resonated with me immediately.” That discovery was just as important as the choice to study art in the first place, she explained.

Nuzzolo works to perfect her printmaking while connecting her work to thematic focuses. One of these is nostalgia. She said that she used to have flowers in her old house. One of the things that she and her mother used to do together was play with flowers while she grew new ones.

“[The] feelings of comfort and warmth [take] you out of where you are,” Nuzzolo said.

In addition to nostalgia, Nuzzolo is inspired by her feelings. Her work has become more personal as she embraced more relaxed feelings in her works.

“My new direction is more comfortable, calm, less aggressive,” Nuzzolo said. “I’m more proud of my own art because I have that [nostalgic] tie to it, it’s more warming than things I was working on before.”

Although her art is certainly reflective and process-oriented, she stresses that “what I feel is not necessarily how I expect others to feel.” The piece she considers her favorite is also her proudest accomplishment thus far. It’s the floral series she created, which is currently hanging in the URI student gallery.

“It’s like, wow, I’m getting somewhere,” she joked.

Nuzzolo also remarked on an amusing story from when she was just starting out in printmaking. “I was a sophomore, and it was one of the first times I used the press, and I didn’t put my hair up,” Nuzzolo said. “I felt my hair get caught and my friend ran in and turned it off. I spent hours getting the ink out of my hair. Sometimes you get so wrapped up in things that the little things like putting your hair up, you just forget.”

She considers the most positive aspect of her experience so far as an art student to be “the community of peers that I have here, especially among other printmakers.”

As for the future, Nuzzolo has very clear goals. As a double major in Art and Education, she hopes to find a position teaching art right out of college.

She decided two years ago that she always wanted to work with children, in a daycare, or with helping other people. She hopes to spread to as many people as possible what she describes as the feeling of, “oh my god, I made this.”