Artist’s Statement‍

My work changes. At the moment it’s going in two main directions: sculptural wall work constructed with wire, ceramics, raw clay and plaster, and mixed media drawings built with layers of ink marks on acetate and paper.

I’m inspired by presence, beauty, sensuality, and how light and shadows dance over texture and form.

For me, the creative process is a devotional practice; a way to be mindful, to pay full attention, and to give of one’s self.

Veronique Maria, October 2026

Biography

Véronique Maria is a multidisciplinary artist of Anglo-Indian and Irish heritage, based in West Sussex. Her practice moves freely across mixed media, painting, ceramics, performance, and land art.

With an independent, questioning spirit from a very early age, she has spent six decades trusting her own instincts over convention. Her early life moved between continents. She lived and was educated in England, New Zealand, Singapore, and Canada. It was a childhood without a fixed centre, and perhaps because of that, she learned early to trust her own read on the world rather than borrow someone else's. That itinerant, self-reliant early experience laid the groundwork for recurring concerns in her later work: place and displacement, memory, and the quiet transformation of material into meaning as a form of processing experience.

Training

Véronique Maria’s formal training began with a Foundation course (1989–90), followed by a BA (hons) at Brighton (1990–94). Between 1996 and 2000 she undertook training in Psychosynthesis, a discipline that continues to inform the introspective and relational qualities of her practice, before returning to formal academic study for an MA (1999–2003).

Practice

Running through Maria’s work is a spiritual vocabulary drawn from several distinct traditions: Roman Catholic iconography absorbed through living a convent life with nuns at the age of six, sacred Māori ritual experienced from her New Zealand upbringing, and Native American craft traditions encountered during her time in Canada. These were later deepened through residencies in New Mexico, and her additional ongoing studies and practice in Tantra and Buddhism. Rather than treating these as separate reference points, Véronique Maria layers and reconciles them, using the resulting visual language to explore questions of belief, ritual, and belonging.

Maria's practice has been supported by Arts Council England funding since 1993. Her work has been shaped substantially by grants and sponsorships, and funded residencies at pivotal moments: the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland (2007), Gullkistan in Iceland (2020), Baer Art Center in Iceland (2011), and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in New Mexico (2014). Each of these has contributed to her material and conceptual development, informing her multidisciplinary practice, particularly her textured paintings and low-relief, wall-hung mixed media works that have become central to her output.

Between 1994 and 2022, Maria was consistently well represented by four commercial galleries in London. She has since stepped back from formal gallery representation by choice, seeking the independence necessary to develop new work free from external constraint – the same self-directed spirit that has defined her since childhood.

Maria’s earliest public exhibitions were in the 1970s and her ongoing exhibition history spans from 1993 to the present, reflecting a sustained and evolving international practice.

She continues to live and work in West Sussex, and is now open to new conversations, collaborations, curatorial projects, and gallery representation.

Contact Véronique Maria