Skip to main content

Veronica Vickery

My work is deeply immersed in place and landscape, understood as spatially lived, as homed; where intimacy and everyday experience are seen in tension to received and often, static narratives of place. I work with complexity layering processes and ideas within individual pieces and across relationships between works taking in performance, text, installation and painting; the work is open and shifting reflecting the potentials of changing relationships to time and space as real and imagined, factual and fictional, constructed and deconstructed.

Recent art projects include BOSopoly - a board game linked to the ongoing BOShomes series of work centered around a fake estate agency www.boshomes.co.uk; The Cruelest Month - an installation and performance in the CAZ project space, Penzance; and Springs Farm - a series of large-scale paintings working from an abandoned farm that explore a story of place in which dwelling hovers just outside of the frame. Trace, residue, gesture, stain, the vibration of colour and perspective, the unexpected and the incongruous, have become tools to excavate memory, absence, loosing and finding, the poetic, the abstract. Being in-place and out-of-place are recurring concerns against a wider political context of empty homes and threatened homelessness.

In my PhD project at Exeter, I am bringing together my work as a visual artist with a longstanding interest in cultural geography to investigate the way images can function to reveal complex and sometimes conflicting cultural histories and contemporary narratives of place. Central to the project are ideas of fluidity and change. The project is focused on a moorland stream in West Penwith that was the centre of a localized storm in 2009. The storm devastated a section of the coastline, with loss of life and substantial damage to the tourist industry. I am visiting and revisiting the site, walking, observing, collecting, measuring, drawing, photographing and writing to focus on the ecological, geological and cultural processes that shape the short life of the stream before it reaches the sea. How might working with the life of the stream lead to the generation of images in the studio that challenge sedimented, static forms of representation and received notions of landscape?

I am an Associate Lecturer in BA Theatre at Falmouth University and member of the Articulating Space research group. My teaching role has enabled me to develop my interest into how arts practices can mirror and mediate socio-political complexities of place, building on my work with the National Trust in West Cornwall as co-director of BOSarts, in which we commission off-site arts projects that function in the complex gaps and interrelationships between people and places.

Education:

  • 2012 - 15
    • PhD Human Geography (art practice-based), University of Exeter
  • 2012
    • PGCHE Academic & Creative Practices, Falmouth University
  • 2008 - 10
    • MA Fine Art: Contemporary Practice Falmouth University
  • 1981 - 85
    • B Ed. Hons. London (Roehampton)

Teaching

  • 2011
    • Associate Lecturer, BA Theatre: Performance, Falmouth University
  • 2010
    • Visiting Lecturer, MA Fine Art: Contemporary Practice, Falmouth University

Selected Exhibitions

  • 2012
    • Articulating Space, UCF commission
    • Weld group show, CAZ, Basement, The Exchange
  • 2011
    • Post-graduate show, Atkinson Gallery, Street
  • 2010
    • MA exhibition UCF
  • 2008
    • Out of Bounds, The Exchange, Penzance
    • Installation & performative events at BOS-08, BOSarts
    • Artist-in-Residence, National Trust in West Penwith
  • 2007
    • Invigorate Seminar, ALIAS, The Exchange (Newlyn Art Gallery)
    • Just Re-Located (Heritage Centre 2025) Installation/performance, Count House, Botallack (National Trust)

Awards & competitions

  • 2012
    • AHRC PhD studentship
  • 2010
    • Sandra Blow award, Falmouth University
    • John Moores 2010 (Shortlisted stage 1)
  • 2008
    • Arts Council England, Grants for the Arts, R&D award (National Trust residency)

Curating

  • 2009
    • This Weekend…?
  • 2008
    • Co-Director BOSarts
    • BOS-08
  • 2007
    • Just Re-Located (Heritage Centre 2025)’, Botallack, More Cornwall

Events

  • 2013
    • Paper/artist presentation, Being IN [landscape], Cornwall Autonomous Zone, The Exchange Gallery, Penzance
  • 2012
    • Paper Environmental Utterance Falmouth University
    • Paper Water:Image University of Plymouth
  • 2011
    • Selected participant Cornwall Workshop (international/regional dialogue over 6 days in response to Lucy Lippard’s 2010 intervention in Falmouth - ‘Imagine Being Here Now’)
  • 2010
    • Paper Creativity and Place University of Exeter
    • Invited ‘artist expert’ The Falmouth Convention (Assembly fieldtrip)

Writing


Veronica Vickery

e-mail: info@veronicavickery.co.uk
website: www.veronicavickery.co.uk
www.bosarts.org