Vicky Wright is a painter inspired by the underside. Her work explores themes of the esoteric, the unseen, and the elusive.
Wright started her career in design with a job in New York City, of which she soon became tired. After a move back to the UK, wright started painting in her attic, launching into her new medium with an exploration of the portrait through ambiguous animal-human hybrids.
Her intriguing perspective was quickly recognised, with her third painting being featured in Frieze art magazine. Vicky then started a degree at Goldsmiths which saw her exploring the limits of the painting, breaking out of the confines of the conventional canvas to paint on the underside of art crates, and create diamond shaped mirror frames in a disarmingly unusual image.
Wright's realisation that she would never be "A European sophisticate" spurred her to lean further in to her "northern kitsch" style.
The artist's interest in philosophy shapes much of her practice, citing feminist philosopher Donna Haraway as a great influence to her work, visible in Wright's exploration of the female cyborg and the female protagonist. The figure plays an interesting role in Wright's work through these themes, sometimes toying with her own presence through the absence of paint and the exposure of raw canvas. This presence was also explained by Wright's love for the female character in the 1960's thriller 'Psycho', who's demise renders the remaining part of the film empty.
Her desire to depict the forgotten or hidden woman underlies much of her practice, notably present in her Tryptich portrait of her Grandmother, a frenetic and energetic series in which a toppling flurry of books forms the shadowy figure, braced by a factory chimney which billows smoke across the murky scene. With these images Wright describes a woman obsessed with cleaning, who's repeated mantra "books are your way out" influenced the artists inquisitive and cogitative way of interacting with the world.
Her interest in Haraway's female cyborg and the liberated female muse informs a practice of building portraits through movement and action rather than a captive subject.
In Wright's recent project, a character portrait of a friend who's esoteric beliefs form behaviour which rejects social convention, the artist sees her role as one of great responsibility, intending to "not puncture my friend's beliefs". Wright can identify that her belief system operates as a safety net, saying that "As an artist, you can approach a difference, and connect with it."
A skilful command of her material is very visible in Wright's paintings, which the artist explained as an understanding of a material which is liquid, and moves fast. Wright's work describes elusive textures such as smoke and clay, in paintings which are both highly cerebral and intuitive.
An articulate and thoughtful speaker, Wright's heady combination of social realism and esoteric enquiry made for a talk which drew the viewers into a world populated by characters from the past and the future, framed by a thinking process informed by philosophy, history and horror, and spoken by an artist with a unique perspective on life.
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