BY HEATHER WARLICK MOORE
Published: December 5, 2011


Oklahoma City has a thriving community of artists that grows more diverse as the city carves out its new identity as a cultural center.
That diversity is partly due to artistic Oklahomans such as Nicole Moan, 33, originally from Sacramento, Calif. The artist, who has lived in Oklahoma City for the past 20 years, creates extraordinary wearable ceramic corsets, wall hangings, sculpted tile murals and anything else her creative mind dreams up. Her work graces galleries from Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles across the country to New York City and in even in Europe.
She and her husband, Jason Moan (pronounced Mo-Ann), 35, a sculptor, and their three daughters live in what looks like an average northwest Oklahoma City home.
Step inside, however, and it's clear you're in artists' quarters. Nearly every inch of the family's living room and main bathroom has been reimagined by the artsy couple. Bright, sculpted ceramic tile scenes inspired by Nicole Moan's painter father, Albert Riddle, adorn the living room floor. Riddle paints in a cubist style the likes of Pablo Picasso with a surrealist twist reminiscent of Salvador Dali.
“My first memory of actually working with art was drawing store plans. My parents used to do interior design for stores and restaurants,” Nicole Moan said. She also remembers building elaborate mud palaces for her Barbie dolls.
Moan's mother, Deborah Elders Riddle, paints primarily with oils and creates equestrian themes and realistic scenes of animals, gardens and people.
Perhaps it was her mother's sensibility for natural subjects that inspired Moan to transform her bathroom into a fantastic underwater world of handmade tiles. A ceramic mermaid's tail sculpture slides up one corner of the room; a claw-foot bathtub is painted deep swirling ocean blue rimmed in gold, and a sculpted tile relief of cubist style hangs over the tub.
Creating corsetsIt was about 10 years ago that Moan created her first corset. She needed something to wear to an art event.
“I used to make fabric corsets, but I never really liked them very much because they just looked like everybody else's corsets,” Moan recalled.
So, Nicole came up with the idea of making a wearable ceramic corset, but she wasn't sure how to do it. When her husband came home from work that day, she asked him how he felt about wearing a ceramic corset — he rolled his eyes and said something like “Oh, God.” (“Now he wears my corsets all the time,” Nicole said.)
And so the two found themselves the night before the event, lying on the floor, their torsos molded in two inches of wet ceramic material, blow-drying themselves.
She remembers thinking, “This is the wrong way to make them.”
Since then, Moan has improved her corset-making process, using her formal education in engineering. She found that dressmakers' dummies weren't very true to real women's bodies, so she crafted her own ceramic bodies of varying sizes and torso lengths on which to design.
Her corsets, more than 50 of which are for sale on her website, come in several styles and can be sized up to about a woman's 20.
Moan's styles include keyhole corsets that dip low into the cleavage; some feature a fold-over collar style; some are waist cinchers; and many of Moan's corsets are designed for men.
Moan also sculpts ceramic wall hanging corsets and other wall art. All her art is shown on her website, www.nicolemoan.com.