Veronica
Slater is an artist now living and working on The Isle of Mull, Scotland. Veronica completed her BA (Hons) in Fine Art Painting at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts and has an MAFA in Fine Art from the University of Northumbria.
Her work is in private and public collections. She has been in prominent UK touring shows including ‘Along the Lines of Resistance’ and ‘The Borrowed lmage’. She has shown internationally including The Judith Anderson Gallery in Auckland, New Zealand and The RHA Gallery in Dublin. Her work has been featured in two major books entitled Dammed Fine Art and Outlooks published by Cassell and Routledge. Artist's Residences have included James Cook University of North Queensland, Australia, Vermont Studio Center, USA and KulttuuriKauppilla, Finland for which she received a Scottish Arts Council Award. She has taught Fine Art at various colleges abroad and in the UK including a permanent post at The City Literary Institute in London. Slater also collaborated on ‘Spent’ a film documenting artists working towards the last exhibition at The Three Colts Gallery, in the east end of London.
Veronica’s current approach to her practice has developed from a range of projects worked on over the last few years. These include CARAVAN (2008) a multi-media artwork that was informed by her experience of living in The Ross of Mull. This work followed on from an installation using wallpaper and photos in the show called Spent (2006). The use of decorative motifs in wallpaper originated with a series of paintings that overlaid painted pattern onto painted landscapes, a combination which brings together two different traditions to create a new meaning.
Veronica’s large painting Cradle Mountain from Twisted Lakes (2006) includes a pastiche of a partial copy of Rococo wallpaper taken from a ‘found fragment’. Because of the pattern's transparency, it appears more like an exquisite net curtain or etched glass screen through which a sumptuous romantic representation of a mountain of Tower of Babel proportions can be seen - rich, exotic and enticing. It is a picture of a picture where the foreground and the background continually shift, creating a ceaseless dislocation of time and place.
In her earlier work dis-Enchantment (2004), a sense of enchantment is activated by the landscape only to be foiled by the repeated pattern. However, the pattern itself produces a different form of beauty or enchantment. These two oppositional forces compete for the viewer’s attention and as a result a transformative space emerges that suggests ‘enchantment’ may forever elude our grasp.
CARAVAN continued to explore the use of wallpaper and paint but in an entirely different context to the paintings. CARAVAN was a total work of art combining architecture, design, film, installation, wallpaper, painting and sculpture. It probed the intrinsic relationship of caravans and ornaments to island life on the west coast of Scotland. Farewell to CARAVAN (2010) was an art event where the artist and the community dismantled and recycled CARAVAN two years on from its inception. It proved an evocative landmark in the passage of time for island life ‘... a thoroughly devastating experience ... and shortbread’
24 Hours (Tor Mor) 2009, a series of 24 paintings, led on from CARAVAN and constructed a sense of place through highly decorative and schematized images. The richy painted patterned motifs, generate spaces and layers through which to view a world of ‘altered states’. It seeks to probe our process of recognition whilst unsettling the familiar relationship with domestic objects and representations of the picturesque. Just as CARAVAN worked within the context of a site, 24 Hours (Tor Mor) seeks an interior in which to expand the work beyond the frame thereby making the paintings part of a wider installation. The intention is to create a work that mutates a ‘sense of place’ by mapping real and imagined spaces.
Real and imagined spaces became the focus of Meidän Talo (Our House) 2010, an exhibition resulting from an artist’s residency at KulttuuriKauppila, Ii, Finland. The title of the exhibition was taken from a popular home making magazine in Finland called Meidän Talo (Our House) that features a range of topics such as interior design, DIY, house sales and prefabricated homes. It is from this magazine that Slater montaged houses and household goods onto tar and paint fragments which she formed in the studio. Slater sealed these tar and paint fragments against enamel surfaces that have spray painted patterns from the lace that adorns many Finnish windows. Through this domestic decorative the viewer enters the great vistas of a strange wilderness that the tar and paint create. Within these ‘fairytale’ islands sit houses that inhabit their own worlds providing a homely refuge from the fears of the unknown. In observing the surrounding houses within a frozen wilderness, the artist realised her own restless quest for a state of mind called home that is Meidän Talo.
This quest evolved further in an Artists in Residence at Inch Kenneth (2010) which provided a unique opportunity to engage with a site that holds an extraordinary history. 'My approach to Inch Kenneth was to make collaborative, transient interventions that explored the physical space and fabric of the building. The work included mixing marbleised ‘paint forms’ from old house paint found in the steadings. These were then placed around the house in response to surfaces that had suffered damp or other notable residue. The tidal marks of water damage resonated with the ‘floating worlds’ of these ‘paint forms’ that at the same time engaged with the monumental volcanic striated cliffs that surround Inch Kenneth. The ‘paint forms’ also mapped a seepage that alluded to the physical and metaphorical nature of the house. It is a house with a pervasive atmosphere that holds the presence of past lives in found objects that when re-arranged create unexpected intensity such as occured in Unity’s room.'
Other interventions included using torn paper to trace shadows of objects in the house. One such object was a figurine of William Wallace. This led to an artwork in the garden that comprised of sheep’s wool tracing the long shadow of a rowan tree. The white of the wool synchronized with the white façade of the house and shaped an iconic image of Inch Kenneth. 'The residency at Inch Kenneth was an intense experience that probed the house’s poignancy through playful and experimental interventions. All the work was documented throughout the residency using film and photography which will form a second part to the body of work from Inch Kenneth'.
The potential of Slater’s practice resides in her ability to creatively respond to different locations by making interventions that are transient and searching. This new direction generates further complexity to the previous concerns of domestic decorative motifs.
'It seems to me that sentimentality and nostalgia are a currency of the domestic decorative which provides a fantasy of a familial condition we can’t let go of. Maybe this is why so much household detritus feeds through my current work. The wallpapered CARAVAN was a transient space that absorbed paint and ornaments. It created another world that I could inhabit and in the last shot of its home movie is the open door with ‘home’ scrawled across it. Why I should be so surprised at these crystal clear connections is perhaps an indication of what is often staring you in the face, is the reality you can’t see. This may seem a terrible admission for an artist to make but I think Daniel Richter’s quote "Beauty through confusion and truth through collision" describes the haphazard state of discovery.'
Artist’s quotes with text by
David Mabb
Artist, Reader in Art and Course Leader in Postgraduate Studies in Art Practice, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.
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Cradle Mountain from Twisted
Lake
(detail)
Oil on two separate canvas'
3m by 2m (10' x 8')
2006 |
