Nicholsloy Studio

"Sloy (1943-2022) first came to our attention when we saw a page of her experimental calligraphic text that was printed in Émigré magazine No.32, 1994. We contacted her by mail in 1995 and made our first purchase of one of her artist books. The experimental container for this book was made by her husband, Dave Nichols (‘Nic’), who fabricates containers for her books from industrial, corrugated cardboard. Nic takes the cardboard from commercially printed boxes and then fashions ingenious locking mechanisms. We hold seven unique artist books and book objects replete with her calligraphic ink and embroidered thread drawings and about 20 handwritten and/or embroidered individual drawings. Our favorite Sloy book is “Iron Fist in Yr Yellow Chakra” (1998) that consists of 103 cards in a handsome container made by her husband Nic. The book consists of calligraphic drawings, one to a card that repetitively presents the title phrase or a minor modification in extremely varied letter styles, sizes, and line densities using ink, paint, lipstick, and graphite. I consider these cards a masterpiece of experimental calligraphy. We spent a delightful day with Sloy and Dave at their house in Salem, Oregon in 2009 and there I learned the origin of her name. She told us that she signed her given name (Sandra Loy) to her earlier paintings as “s. loy.” But onlookers could not easily read the period after the ‘s’ of her last name and called her Sloy, a name that stuck to her as a nom de plume."

-Ruth and Marvin Sackner