Veronica
Slater is an artist now living and working on The Isle of Mull, Scotland. She completed her BA (Hons) in Fine Art Painting at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in 1980 and has an MA in Fine Art from the University of Northumbria.
Her work is in private and public collections and has been in prominent UK touring shows including ‘Along the Lines of Resistance’ and ‘The Borrowed lmage’. Veronica has also shown internationally including The Judith Anderson Gallery in Auckland, New Zealand. 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 and Vermont Studio Center, USA. She has taught Fine Art at various colleges abroad and in the UK including The City Literary Institute in London. A recent project has been a collaboration on a film documenting artists working towards the exhibition ‘Spent’.
Veronica’s current work is an art installation called CARAVAN which is informed by her experience of living in The Ross of Mull. This work follows on from an installation using wallpaper and photos in a show called ‘Spent’. CARAVAN continues to explore the use of wallpaper, ornaments and paint but in an entirely different context to the paintings.
The paintings have for the past few years 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..
David Mabb
Artist and Senior Lecturer & Programme leader
MAFA
Visual Arts Dept, Goldsmith College,
London
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Cradle Mountain from Twisted
Lake
(detail)
Oil on two separate canvas'
3m by 2m (10' x 8')
2006 |
