Guest
Nicole Schafter
Episode Number
№2
Nicole Schafter is an Australian artist, entrepreneur and former retail executive whose story is about creativity, identity and having the courage to begin another chapter.
Nicole had been creating since childhood and studied visual arts, but her professional life initially took her somewhere very different.
For almost three decades, she built a career leading people and businesses across the retail industry, working in senior operational roles and developing teams across Australia and New Zealand.
It was a successful career.
But creativity had never disappeared.
In 2017, Nicole founded YourArt, turning something that had existed quietly throughout her life into the centre of it.
Her work is deliberately difficult to categorise. From bold figurative pieces and abstraction to architecture and digital work, Nicole creates instinctively, drawing on emotion, travel, nature, relationships and the different seasons of her own life.
For Nicole, art is not simply decoration.
It is about connection.
Over recent years, her work has increasingly explored self-acceptance, identity and the relationship between the spaces we surround ourselves with and the way we feel about ourselves.
She has also taken that philosophy beyond the studio, supporting Find My Wild, an organisation helping people rebuild after domestic abuse, through both board involvement and an art collaboration that contributes directly to the organisation’s work.
In The 8th Voice, Nicole explores what happens when the identity that has defined you for decades begins to change, why creativity sometimes waits patiently until we are ready for it, and how learning to accept ourselves can completely alter what we create and how we live.
It is a conversation about career, courage, self-expression and understanding that starting again does not mean everything before it was wasted.
