Nicole Nikolich, also known as @lace_in_the_moon, works with crochet as if it were a tool for emotional archiving. The yarns she interlaces draw on a very specific aesthetic: that of the early 2000s. Her practice began with yarnbombing interventions addressing mental health, pop culture, and LGBTQ+ themes, but more recently it has focused on the imagery we associate with the early internet and the technology that shaped an entire generation.
In the coming weeks, she will present user_history, her first major solo exhibition at Paradigm Gallery + Studio in Philadelphia. On view will be more than thirty new works: flip phones, Game Boys, early-2000s desktop app icons—each recreated by hand with thousands of stitches that mimic the structure of the pixel. Objects designed to sit in the palm of a hand are enlarged until they become sculptural presences, almost monumental, scaled not to their real size but to the space they occupy in collective memory.
This tension between the digital and the handcrafted is at the core of her research: crochet, a technique traditionally tied to the domestic sphere, comes up against the cold, minimal aesthetic of early electronic devices. The result is a visual short circuit that makes tangible what was born immaterial. Nicole Nikolich’s work stands out for an almost radical physicality: there is no digital filter, no print, no simulation—only manual skill and repetition.
A key step in this reflection is Can I Please Eat In The Computer Room Tonight, a project currently on view at The Delaware Contemporary Museum as part of the exhibition Diner Table. For this installation, Nikolich recreated an entire computer room in crochet, turning it into a space that is immersive and familiar at the same time. Four iconic video game screens—such as The Sims 2, the winning screen of Solitaire, Minesweeper, and the Neopets marketplace—have been translated into textile surfaces, displayed alongside a functioning 1987 computer.
The work evokes that moment when access to the internet was confined to one specific room in the house, often furnished in brown tones and filled with objects accumulated over time. The computer room became a refuge—a space for exploration and autonomy—where you could message late into the night, invent secret languages in chats, build virtual friendships, and begin to see yourself through the lens of a front-facing camera. It was a transitional place, suspended between childhood and adolescence, where technology represented a possibility for transformation more than a distraction.
Between user_history and this domestic environment rebuilt stitch by stitch, Nikolich consolidates a practice that brings personal memory and collective imagination into dialogue. Her works speak about technology without using technology, drawing attention back to the body, to the time required to build each surface, and to a generational archive that keeps resurfacing. The pixel becomes thread, the screen becomes fabric, and nostalgia takes on a concrete, inhabitable form.
