Nicole Wermers’ sculptures combine everyday household items, decorative objects, and brand paraphernalia with expressive clay figures. Juxtaposing ‘high’ and ‘low’ visual language, Wermers destabilizes the traditional hierarchies of form and function, drawing out their social and political implications. Often absurdist, and always tongue-in-cheek, the artist uses dis-function and use-lessness to to highlight and undermine the gender, and class, politics of public space, design, and architecture. She adopts the ‘tactics’ of Michel de Certeau and urban design to frame her work with a network of equal and intersecting agents — art object, commercial material, bureaucratic health and safety equipment, and human operator / viewer.  Wermers large-scale works and installations vacillate between sculpture and ready-made, revealing the latent possibilities of all objects, and spaces.