Veronica Vickery

My practice fuses and layers sculpture, ceramics, painting, performance, sound and most recently weaving. It is materials-led and site-responsive using foraged, discarded, waste, gifted and inherited materials and objects that hold personal significance. I explore environments in which human experiences of vulnerability, grief and loss find echo in more-than-human ecologies, which I encounter in a deeply embodied wet and muddy way. I understand breakdown — of matter, objects and material ecologies — as a precursor to all ongoing life-forming processes of repair and re-formation. I navigate within this tension between materially embodied processes of fragility, loss, repair and growth.

I gather things that form my material, ecological and affective world: warming yarn and fleece, gnarled end-of-life steel pocked by aged rivet holes and flaking rust, foraged Estuarine mud teaming with germinating mud-flat plants, discarded utilitarian objects and plastic consumer waste. My making processes and scores respond directly to the inherent qualities of these materials – their touch, smell and sound – along with the matter-contained memory, affect and narrative they hold. Labour-intensive and repetitive processes of making disrupt, mend and transform to often build immersive sculptural environments of audience encounter and activation. Through slow time, inherited crafting techniques and the juxtaposition of these materials and processes, I seek to care for the lost and discarded, creating holding and nesting spaces through loss to be quietly encountered and navigated.

Over recent years I've lived in the far west of Cornwall close to the Atlantic, on a boat on the volatile River Avon near Bristol until very recently moving back on land to the edge of a tiny village in the Mendips under a spring-dotted hill above Blagdon Lake.

Over the years I've curated DIY site-specific projects and set up community organisations. I've taught for a number of years in Universities in Cornwall - teaching sited performance practices on the BA Theatre Studies at Falmouth (2011-17) and cultural geography on the BA Human Geography at Exeter (2013 - 2018).