FAIRY TOOT

Veronica Vickery

This exhibition represents in many ways a return: to the act of making and crafting that once connected Veronica with her mother, and to a childhood search for spaces of refuge found in the sunken lanes, fields and woods of Somerset. Created through a time of loss and change, it is also a process of beginning anew — a form of nesting and a response to precarity, as she makes a sense of home within a new season of life in the quiet landscape of the Mendip Hills.

The title of the exhibition is taken from the name of the substantial Neolithic chambered barrow on top of the hill behind her house.

“The field in which this barrow stands has from time immemorial been called the Fairy field; and the common people say that strange noises have been heard underneath the hill, and visions, portentous to children, have been seen waving in the thickets that crown its summit.” (18th century antiquarian John Collinson).

Artists Statement

Veronica Vickery’s materials-led practice spans sculpture, installation, ceramics, painting, performance, and sound, and has recently expanded to include spinning and weaving. Working through direct engagement with site, she uses foraged, discarded, wasted, and gifted materials.

Her work draws on personal narratives of loss and fragility as they resonate through post-natural environments. She understands breakdown and loss — of matter, objects, and more-than-human ecologies — as integral to cycles of care, repair, re-formation, and life-making.