Nettles is known for experimenting with alternative photographic processes. She utilizes several photo-mechanical printing techniques such as photolithography and silkscreen.[3]
Nettles' work tackles issues of family relationships, woven together with mythology and natural history, often in dream-like juxtapositions. Like many feminists of her generation, she used her own body to explore the ways in which personal identities also reflected political and social realities. Art historian Jonathan Fineberg wrote that Nettles' 1970 "Suzanna...Surprised," for example, "demonstrated in the uneven brown-stained surface...the defiant subject matter.... She stuffed this unmistakably confrontational nude self-portrait and sewed it around the edges, then fixed it on to a faint image of a formal garden."[4] Of Turning 50 (first published in 1995) critic Amber Hares wrote: "What is most noteworthy about Turning 50 is that Nettles, finding beauty in veins as she does in the vines that run up trees, is aging with grace."[5]
In her later career, Nettles has excelled in book arts, teaching classes at the School of Information Science at the University of Illinois. She has traveled extensively, leading workshops on book-binding and book arts in Iceland, Italy and Alaska. She has also reflected on her earlier career through new collages and composite images, such as "Return Trips." Art historian Jordana Mendelson wrote of these juxtapositions: "When Nettles reuses a photograph from an earlier work and combines these new works with her mother's poetry, we are reminded of core ideas shared between generations in the Nettles family who have made the creative act an integral part of their lives."[6]
Books
Nettles has published many books, including:
Flamingo In The Dark (1979)
Corners: Grace and Bea Nettles (1988)
Knights of Assisi: Journey through the Tarot (1990)
The Skirted Garden: Twenty Years of Images (1990)
Life’s Lessons: A Mother's Journal (1990)
Complexities (1992)
Grace’s Daughter (1994)
Turning 50 (1995)
Memory Loss (1997)
Seasonal Turns (1999)
The Observer, Philadelphia: Borowsky Center for Publication Arts (2005)
Western July: Summer Instamatics
Events In Water & Events In The Sky
The Imaginary Blowtorch
The Elsewhere Bird
A is for Applebiting Alligators
The Nymph of the Highlands
Swamp Lady
Dream Pages
Of Loss and Love
Lake Lady and Neptune(One-of-a-Kind)
Ghosts and Stitched Shadows(One-of-a-Kind)
Padded Parades(One-of-a-Kind)
B and the Birds: A Collection(One-of-a-Kind)
Grace Nettles: Poems & Dreams(One-of-a-Kind)
Escape(One-of-a-Kind)
Florida Fantasy(One-of-a-Kind)
Events in the Water(One-of-a-Kind)
Feasts and Feats(One-of-a-Kind)
Alternative Processes Textbook:
Breaking the Rules: A Photo Media Cookbook (3rd edition, 1992)
Collections
Her work is included in over twenty major museum collections including:
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