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 doctoral researcher at Ulster University Belfast School of Art. Her practice-based research centres around the concept of decoloniality in contemporary painting and literature in 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. Both of these experiences inform her research and practice.
Her work has been exhibited internationally and is held in 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 International Drawing Box Collective forms part of the National Irish Visual Art Library (NIVAL) in Dublin. Her work also forms part of private collections in Ireland, the United Kingdom, France, North America and Australia.
ARTIST STATEMENT
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 coloniality in both Northern Ireland and the French Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe.
The first paintings of this series (2019-2022) were based on Caribbean motifs as well as motifs in the north of Ireland. My exhibition Hell or high water II 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. My most recent solo show Hell or high water III took place at Atypical Gallery in Belfast from 14th January - 21st February 2025. As with the previous paintings in this series, the new work uses recycled coffee bean sacks as an oil paint surface and the paint is applied in raw gestures, the texture of the support forming an integral part of the painting surface.
The title of the exhibition signifies perseverance and persistence in the face of challenges and the paintings touch on decolonial concerns such as the climate crisis, deforestation, the destruction of biodiversity, the historic displacement of people, and the legacy of racial and sectarian violence.