Nicotine

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.

Nicotine is an ode to the life of Ericsson’s mother and a meditation on the lingering impressions that remain when a life ends. In transforming seemingly banal snapshots into newly conceived forms, Ericsson recontextualizes the images, elevates them, and preserves the newfound narratives that they carry—stories that would otherwise be buried with the deceased.

Nicotine takes the form of a strange and eccentric family album. Its cover is bound in a luxurious tobacco-colored, suede-like cloth that evokes the drapery of interiors from another time. It is a physical memorial that captures the fading essence of a life once lived. With echoes of a nineteenth-century scientific catalog, each of the twenty-six images are individually tipped on the book's pages, referencing the meticulous attention given to a family scrapbook.

The process of burning these images into existence using the same chemicals that contributed to his mother’s deteriorating health transforms the book into a sacred vessel invoking a seance, an altarpiece, and a ritualistic act of remembering. The tones of the nicotine-stained prints vary, reminding us that each print is an act of performance and a unique, physical record of time. Here the fugitive print qualities of photographs are inverted—rather than fade away, the image materializes, rising from the ashes to be remembered.

Printed in a limited edition of 500 copies, each book is hand-numbered, signed, and features a final personal touch—each is burned with a lit cigarette, making every book a singular tribute to the ephemerality of life.