Statement

I came to art while taking a break from graduate school, studying art and family systems, to grieve my Mother’s passing. It was during those two years that I ventured in to the studio as a full time artist and student of the materials I would steward in my art practice.

I create three-dimensional sculptures that represent a sense of “place” and to explore what it means to belong in a world hungry for accelerated success. Here, I refer to the word belong as a verb, meaning the act, process, practice and cultivation of being a part of. I long to restore and mend the conflict between our external drive, and our returning to an internal world of contentment and meaning, as a mirror to how we see ourselves interacting and in partnership with the larger landscape. I aim to draw attention to and recognition of a natural world filled with wonder and intelligence. I search for the place underneath our trivial stories, in myself and in others, to see what yearns to be transformed. I long to repair our separation and re-imagine a less limited and more expanded whole system view of our lives, co-mingling with the land and our place within it, rooted to birdsong, wildlife, habitats and the knowledge of plants long used for their medicinal and color value. I like to address the tension between circular and linear, gain and loss, personal limits versus expanded viewpoints, barriers and permission.

I work with raw plant materials, mining color and fiber, as a way to relive and reclaim my wholeness, and hence to find my sense of place, beginning from within. In using plant fibers to make nests, virgin paper fibers to spin a spool of yarn and thread made stiff to function in support of itself, I aim to rebirth a story of my remembering. Both ubiquitous and largely unseen, it goes against logic that thread, a delicate fiber, can function as principal part of our wardrobe. Thread reminds me of the delicate balance of living within our biological means. I aim to defy the current story of excess and return to a model of simplicity, and harness the wonder of a bird in flight. In working with a limited color palette and materials, I commit to procure what has always existed but need only be rediscovered.

About:

Victoria Ayres is an artist currently based in Berkeley California. After finishing high school in Southern California, where she danced with a Classical ballet company, she spent time between the West Coast studying Art History at UCSB and the East Coast studying Theater Design at New College and a bit of dance theatre in NYC.

She returned to build her roots in the east bay of Northern California and to produce online digital media and in-classroom curricula on storytelling within the context of the Earth’s natural ecosystems. There, she evolved her study of dance to include storytelling and visual art at the Tamalpa Institute in Marin County.

It was her time in NYC, though, while living with her Mother, a sculpture artist with a studio on the Lower East Side, that continues to resonate deep in her bones as a mixed media artist today. The stories of her Mother working in the studio of sculpture artist Ursula Von Rydingsvard, being mentored by Louise Bourgeois and her very personal and close friendship with feminist artist Hannah Wilke as well as others, speaks to her draw toward textured sculpture, influences her explorations in relief and in the slow process of making-by-hand that fills her days in the studio.  

She has studied with Carole Beadle, Lisa Kokin, and Sheila Metcalf Tobin, artists whom she continues to call her mentors. She credits an early love of thread from her interest in the quiet language of stitch, learned in a Home Economics class in 7th grade.