Jacques Nimki was born in Port Louis, Mauritius. He studied at the Royal College of Art, the Royal Academy Schools and Chelsea School of Art in London. His practice attempts to articulate the complex relationships between landscape and identity in contemporary culture. Contrasts such as nature and culture, interior and exterior, visible and hidden are considered in his work, alongside divisions such as public and private, real and artificial.
His projects have taken the form of weed fields inside buildings, drawing installations, weeds grown hydroponically and weeds displayed in glass and as traditional floral arrangements. Other aspects of his work have included concocting a variety of both non and alcoholic weedy beverages, exploring the culinary delights of weeds, and creating rare and desirable weed beauty products.
Jacques works from and within the urban landscape, using mainly weeds and flowers as a way of exploring how we perceive others and ourselves within particular environments. Plants, like people, are often looked at but not seen, forgotten in the backdrop of the everyday, inhabiting places that are neglected or unexplored. Each work is about a sense of place: researching and ‘walking’ an area, Jacques collects seeds, plants for drawing, and flowers for pressing. He also references flora from a variety of sources including the media and images of populist decorative flora captured in domestic and commercial settings. His extensive research materials support his practice, and are stored on a database of over 120 plants in over twenty categories, with a basic description plus information on the plant’s alleged magical properties, social history, edibility and various symbolic associations.