about
After graduating from a Masters in Fine Art from Edinburgh College of Art, Vicky Neil exhibited extensively in the UK and Europe. She has work in private and public collections including Eastern General Hospital, Edinburgh, South & East Belfast Health and Social Services Trust and Modern Art Civic Collection, La Spezia, Italy.
Vicky taught Foundation Course, BA and MA courses in Leeds, Dundee, Aberdeen and Belfast before deciding to set up a small business making small batch handmade products and artworks in 2009.
Over the last few years Vicky has returned to making one off pieces for exhibition.
"the city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of the hanged usurper's swaying feet ... the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of the guttering and a cat's progress along it as he slips in the same window..."
cities & memory 3, invisible cities, italo calvino
artist's statement
My work centres around two long-standing interests: the recovery of something poetic from everyday objects and materials and a fascination with the processes of human engagement with these objects and materials particularly in relation to the human need to handmake, write and draw, something that seems more relevant than ever.
I select and collect found materials and papers as well as foraged colour and texture, often working with specific places or particular landscapes. I am drawn to abandoned places and objects in order to seek out the memories of their former human interactions.
Within my work I use the language of construction such as templates and patterns, tacking and pinning in order to explore ideas of time and the presence of the maker. I make and take apart, construct, destroy and build back in an effort to speak of human interactions with processes and materials, revealing and concealing the layers of contact. I use layers of chalk pigment and beeswax to seal and sometimes conceal the work. The pieces are suggestive of an ongoing process, a lost train of thought or possibly a state of decay, they reveal and sometimes conceal elements recorded on the paper.
In my Inheritance series the materials are fairly meaningless paper documents, the paper ephemera we collect throughout our lives, rental agreements, ledgers and disused house deeds. In the pieces I invite the viewer to peer between the lines of text for glimpses of something human amidst the formalities of administration.
Alongside my mixed media work I have an ongoing project drawing on a collection of used vintage postcards to compliment each series of works.