Vikkie Patterson in her studio on an artist residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig with thanks to Lisburn and Castlereagh City Council.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Vikkie Patterson is a painter and a PhD researcher at Ulster University Belfast School of Art. Her practice-based research centres around the concept of embodiment in contemporary painting and literature from Northern Ireland. She has a previous French and Germanic Studies degree from Trinity College Dublin and lived previously in the French Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe. This informs her research and practice.
Her work has been exhibited internationally and is held in private collections in Ireland, France, North America, Australia and the U.K. as well as in public collections at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, the African and Caribbean Support Organisation Northern Ireland (ACSONI) headquarters in Belfast and at the Kanu Nayak Art Foundation in Mumbai, India. A touring exhibition with the Drawing Box Collective forms part of the National Irish Visual Art Library (NIVAL) in Dublin.
ARTIST STATEMENT
The practice-based element of my research is informed by painting theories such as phenomenology and indexicality. My new work-in-progress transcends the figurative and the literal and I paint in raw gestures with impasto and drawn elements, the texture of the support forming an integral part of the painting surface. My studio practice relates to embodiment in the studio, staying present and attuned to the materiality of the painting process. Hell or high water is an ongoing series of oil on sackcloth paintings begun in 2019 reflecting on the upheaval caused by the climate crisis as well as depicting postcolonial concerns in both N. Ireland and the French Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and surrounding islands.
Most recently, my solo show Hell or high water opened on the 24th July 2023 at the Market Place Theatre Gallery, Armagh as part of the John Hewitt International Summer School and continued until the 2nd of September 2023. As with the previous paintings in this series, the work uses recycled coffee bean sacks and other sackcloth, which I stretch and size and prime before adding oil paint layers. The first paintings of this series (2019-2022,) which can be viewed on this website also, were based on Caribbean motifs as well as motifs in the north of Ireland and these new paintings are based solely on motifs in the north of Ireland. The title of the exhibition signifies perseverance and persistence in the face of challenges. Some of the paintings touch on contemporary political issues such as global warming, the displacement of people and the changes here in the north of Ireland today compared to the recent past.