Nikki McClure has made a remarkably fluid move from living close to the edge as a starving artist with a passion for all things green to a successful mama-artist with a small forest of her own. She took the same leap of faith as many other artists, going from nine-to-five to freelance soon after college, but she managed to land in a sweet place with a bit of luck and ingenuity.
Nearly ten years ago, McClure was a twenty-something artist living in Olympia, Washington. A self-proclaimed Riot Grrrl, she was sewing mittens to sell on tour for the punk band, Kicking Giant, and getting around in a falling-apart VW bug. It was November, and she was supposed to be in a show in December. What to do? The idea came to her to make a calendar. She’d recently switched from making linoleum block prints and scratchboard to tracing pictures onto black paper and then cutting them with an X-acto knife, and she employed this method for the calendar.
It was a success. Each year since, she’s doubled the print run of the calendars, to which she gives thought-provoking titles like “Things to Make and Do for the Next 1,000 Years” or “The Time Is Now.” Today, the calendar provides enough income to support her, her woodworker partner, Jay-T, their son, Finn, and the family’s modest Olympia home. She admits that her vagabond younger self never could have foreseen her current domestic life, but she thinks she would have approved.
“I remember being at a Riot Grrrl conference in my twenties,” says the soft-spoken McClure. “I was listening to these women who were a decade older, and it occurred to me that some day I could be an artist and drive a safe car!”
McClure has long been dedicated to her life as an artist, to the extent that if eschewing a regular paycheck meant periodically making and selling burritos at music festivals to supplement her income, so be it. But she’s not without a practical streak. As a student at Evergreen State College in the late 1980s, she majored in science, thinking it might eventually provide her better career opportunities. She created her own course of study, which merged her interests. One of her “courses” was a weeklong study of a marsh fly. She made a series of entomological drawings and wrote a quasi-scientific report about her subject that included some seriously creative segues. “I did this whole twisted patriarchal thing on insect pornography going back and forth between straight entomology and the voice of the female fly,” she explains with a laugh that walks the line between what was I thinking? and isn’t that great?
Out of college, she worked for the Washington Department of Ecology and did some freelance projects, but she longed to be a solvent, independent artist—which is about the time that a friend suggested she move to cut paper as her major medium. “The first time I cut paper was a moment when all the synapses in my brain came together in harmony. It felt so good,” she says.
Her first work in the new medium was a series of apples that she turned into a book, using Kinko’s to make copies and ribbon to bind them. “I showed them in a little nature store below my apartment, and actually sold them!” she recalls. It was the moment when she believed that her love for the environment and her ability to make art could come together in a sustaining way.
Of course, it helped that her means were meager. There was that rickety VW Bug, and her $100 rent for half of a studio apartment. At thirty, aching for her own place in the world, she scraped together enough for a little house and began to put down roots, literally, by planting more than thirty trees on her urban lot. Another few years passed, and she fell in love. Although she’d never intended to have kids, she suddenly found her body “screaming” to become a mother.
