Victoria King - MA Fine Art
The Abject Sublime
For millennia, making things with our hands was an embodied activity necessary for survival. When the Industrial Revolution made mass production possible, it provided riches for a few but a grim existence for many and led to the development of increasingly toxic materials and immoral weapons of war. A practice of recycling and ‘making do’ was and still is for countless people around the world a necessity often embellished with creativity. Being an artist is a privilege, yet like all humans, we have blind spots and engage in denial and hypocrisy, use inappropriate materials and dubious processes. Consumption as the world burns. I have an affinity with the unloved and broken and grieve for our planet’s vulnerable humans and more-than-human life. Displaced to an urban environment after living off-grid amongst wild, natural beauty, my conscience demands that I have an ethical art practice with a low ecological footprint.
During my MA in Fine Art I have made a cacophony of strange, interstitial memento mori with discarded and recycled materials. Primal, ambiguous, often blob-like ur-objects have emerged that hold space at the intersection of nature and a culture known for its obscene waste. Working spontaneously, I trust not knowing while courting failure, indulge in risk-taking to counter banality. Honouring personal and collective grief, I resuscitate and reanimate what is discarded, literally and metaphorically, to create votives and shrines for the unmourned. With Sisyphean determination, I eschew form for formlessness, and unafraid of the irrational and unconscious, I futilely attempt to lay to rest hungry ghosts. Anarchic, awkward hybrid objects dance with the unheimlich as the familiar becomes unfamiliar and unsettling. An orchestrated choreography of the unexpected, a negative aesthetic that reflects the anxiety of our turbulent times, an art of autoethnography.
© Dr. Victoria King 2025
