Nicotine

First edition of Nicotine by TR Ericsson. First impression. Medium format, in new condition. Screw post-bound hardcover folio with tipped in images. Signed, numbered (332/500) and burned by the artist.

About

Multimedia artist TR Ericsson reimagines personal family photographs in his deeply moving book, Nicotine. To create the artworks, Ericsson employs a unique process that involves passing nicotine through a halftone silkscreen, resulting in a ghostly imprint of an image. The resulting prints are as much about the haunting presence of the past manifested in photographs as they are about memory’s ephemeral nature.

A lifelong smoker, Ericsson’s mother, Sue, would often stay up late into the night at her dining table, cigarette in hand. After her death by suicide in 2003, Ericsson was faced with the task of cleaning her home and its nicotine-stained walls. This experience served as the catalyst for the creation of the nicotine works. As Ericsson scraped the wallpaper, he thought not just of the physical stains but of his mother herself—alone, up all night, ruminating over her past.