“Pide tiempo (Ask for time)”
Claudia Nicholson
24 Apr → 19 June 2027
Gallery
Parramatta Artists Studios, Performance Space and West Space are pleased to announce Claudia Nicholson as the inaugural artist selected for Reverb, a new commissioning partnership supporting ambitious work at the intersection of visual art and performance.
Developed by the three organisations, Reverb provides mid-career artists with the time, co-investment, fundraising capacity and curatorial engagement required to develop major new projects across multiple contexts, audiences and presentation formats.
For her Reverb commission, Claudia will develop Pide tiempo (Ask for time), a major new project exploring the instability of memory, the politics of representation, and the ruptures through which identity emerges. Her selection reflects the strength of an interdisciplinary practice that moves between image, embodiment, and archive, and reflects Reverb’s commitment to contextual artistic development, audience engagement and sustained cross-institutional support.
Research and development
Supported through both Reverb and external fundraising, Claudia will enter into a critical period of travel, research and development in 2026. Informed by her experience as an adoptee from Colombia raised in Australia, she will soon embark on research travel to Bogotá, Colombia and New York, USA, conducting place-based investigation and engaging with leading artists, curators and Latinx cultural practitioners whose work intersects with migration, identity, memory and belonging. She will also travel to the Amazon, where she will document the pink river dolphin and explore its symbolic position within the persistence of colonial myths that continue to impact local communities and ecosystems.
Presentation pathway
Reverb will unfold through three interconnected presentations, each responding to a distinct context and clarifying Pide Tiempo’s core inquiry into return as a recursive process shaped by movement, echo, and repetition.
The first presentation will take shape through a major exhibition at West Space presented from 24 April to 19 June 2027. The exhibition will initiate audiences into the visual and conceptual ecosystem of Pide tiempo.
The work will then be developed with Performance Space in 2027, where its performative dimensions will be activated through live exchange, embodiment and collective experience.
The final iteration will be presented by Parramatta Artists Studios for Parramatta Lanes in 2028, adapting the project to the scale and complexity of the public realm and creating new encounters for audiences in Western Sydney.
A new commissioning model
As the first artist commissioned through Reverb, Claudia Nicholson will help establish a new model for artistic development and cross-institutional presentation in Australia – one that foregrounds collaboration, long-term investment and the exchange between organisations, disciplines and audiences. Through Parramatta Artists Studios, Performance Space and West Space, Reverb creates the conditions for ambitious new work to grow across multiple sites, taking on new forms and resonances as it moves between performance, moving image and exhibition practice.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.
Reverb is a commissioning partnership between Parramatta Artists Studios, Performance Space, and West Space.
Claudia Nicholson is a Colombian-born Australian artist working across moving image, performance, photography, installation, and painting. For over ten years, she has developed an interdisciplinary practice rooted in material interpretations of kinship, memory and the struggle against forgetting, centring her own relationship to Colombia and the broader Latin American region. Nicholson's work explores intersecting themes of diaspora, memory and return — shaped by her experience as an adoptee from Colombia raised in Australia. She is a current studio resident at Parramatta Artists Studios, Sydney.