IN PURSUIT OF EXPRESSING The InEXPRESSIBLE
Since 1975, through a sustained practice that spans sculpture, ceramics, painting, performance, film, and installation, Véronique Maria has built not a body of work, so much as a living investigation - a prolonged, embodied attempt to reach the tantalisingly unreachable core of lived experience. The word ‘ineffable’ is Véronique’s own. Too great, too sacred, too essentially felt to be named. She has spent her working life trying to name it anyway: in clay, in oil, in the language of flowers that has haunted her since girlhood, in the volcanic geology of Iceland, in the mess and weight of her own body making marks in space.
the material intelligence
Véronique’s relationship to materials is foundational to understanding her work. She does not choose a medium; she feels into it so as to know it intimately and to become it. Clay is not a sculptural support – it is the body of the earth made supple by the artist’s hands, fired by heat, broken and embedded into painted canvas as a kind of geological invasion.
Paint is not a surface coating, it is a visceral substance with behaviour, memory, a propensity to pool, to bleed, to respond to the atmosphere of the room. To Véronique these materials are alive. Her large-scale, heavily textured mixed media canvases - some reaching eight metres - demand physical engagement before they demand intellectual interpretation.
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“I wanted to have a broad vocabulary. I wanted to learn how to do everything so that I could express my ideas in as many ways as I could.”
Véronique Maria