Victoria King - MA Fine Art
The Abject Sublime
For millennia, making things with our hands was an embodied activity necessary for survival. 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. Consumption as the world burns. I grieve for our planet’s vulnerable human 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.
Lines of thought, thread, cloth, clay, plaster, and paper merge to bind, wrap, enfold, embrace, swathe, constrict, blur, entangle, enmesh, swaddle, and shroud. A cacophony of strange, interstitial memento morimade of discarded and recycled materials. Embodiments of memory, manifestations of joy, chaos, despair, disintegration, impermanence, renewal. Primal, ambiguous, often blob-like ur-objects hold space at the intersection of nature and a culture known for its obscene waste. Each piece is singular yet interconnected. Juxtapositions are infinite. A jumble of shapeshifting, unravelling threads hang suspended by a whisper as tall, free-standing pieces rise above the fracas and floor pieces collapse.
No longer content to rely on Modernist conceptions of aesthetic beauty, my work now borders on folly, often on ugliness. Working spontaneously, I trust not knowing while courting failure, indulge in risk-taking to counter banality. Honouring personal and collective grief, I create shrines for the unmourned. With Sisyphean determination, unafraid of the irrational and unconscious, I eschew form for formlessness, futilely attempting 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.
