The Artist Behind the Cover: Nicola Hicks and the Beauty of Raw Instinct

When we were searching for an artist to create the cover for our Heart of Darkness fragrance, we knew we needed someone who understood the untamed. Someone who could capture Conrad's journey into the primitive heart of human nature—not through pretty illustrations, but through something more visceral, more honest.

We found that artist in Nicola Hicks.

Her charcoal sketch Spinney became our cover—a work that captures the jungle's encroachment on the river, the way wilderness presses against civilization's fragile boundaries. In Hicks' hands, Conrad's metaphor becomes physical reality: dark marks bleeding across paper like vegetation consuming everything in its path.

Hicks is Britain's sculptor of wild souls, creating creatures that seem to breathe with primal energy. Her work—cast in bronze or built from straw and plaster—exists in that liminal space between civilization and wilderness, between tenderness and menace. Exactly where Conrad's masterpiece lives.

Straw, Bronze, and Something Untamed

Born in London in 1960, Hicks studied at Chelsea School of Art before completing her training at the Royal College of Art. But her real education came from somewhere deeper—an intuitive understanding of animal form that goes beyond mere observation. Her sculptures don't just depict bears, bulls, and hybrid creatures; they embody their essence.

What makes Hicks extraordinary is her choice of materials. Early in her career, she began working with straw and plaster, creating rough-hewn forms that captured movement and emotion in ways that felt almost painterly. The straw gave her creatures a tactile immediacy—surfaces alive with texture and energy. Many pieces were later cast in bronze, preserving their raw power while giving them permanence.

Standing before a Hicks sculpture is like encountering something that's just emerged from the forest. Her animals carry psychological weight—they're not zoo specimens but beings with inner lives, radiating defiance, grief, or quiet contemplation.

Mythology Made Manifest

Hicks' work operates on multiple levels. While rooted in direct observation, her sculptures tap into something more ancient—the realm of myth and folklore. Her bears evoke both brute strength and protective motherhood. Her human-animal hybrids bring to mind the shapeshifters of ancient stories, exploring themes of transformation and the untamed aspects of the human psyche.

This mythic quality made her the perfect collaborator for Heart of Darkness. Conrad's novella isn't just about a journey up the Congo River—it's about descending into the primal depths of human nature, confronting the beast that lurks beneath civilization's veneer. Hicks understands this territory intimately.

Spinney embodies this understanding. The charcoal sketch doesn't illustrate Conrad's story—it inhabits it. The jungle doesn't simply exist in the drawing; it advances, encroaches, threatens to overwhelm. Like Conrad's prose, Hicks' marks on paper suggest something darker lurking just beyond what we can see.

Recognition and Resonance

Since gaining prominence in the 1980s—including representing Britain at the São Paulo Biennale in 1985—Hicks has exhibited at major institutions from the Tate Gallery to Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Her influence extends beyond sculpture, inspiring artists who explore the intersection of nature, myth, and raw materiality.

But perhaps most importantly, Hicks creates work that resonates on an instinctual level. Her sculptures don't ask to be admired—they demand to be felt. They confront us with life's essential tensions: strength versus fragility, civilization versus wilderness, beauty versus brutality.

The Scent of Wild Souls

This is why Hicks' aesthetic connects so powerfully with our approach to fragrance. Like her sculptures, our Heart of Darkness doesn't offer easy beauty. It's a challenging, complex composition that reveals different facets as you wear it—much like encountering one of Hicks' bronze beasts, which seem to shift and change as you move around them.

Both artist and perfumer understand that the most memorable experiences often come from work that unsettles as much as it enchants. In a world of safe choices and predictable pleasures, Hicks reminds us that true art—whether sculpture or scent—should awaken something primal within us.

Something untamed. Something enduring. Something deeply, irrevocably alive.