Meet the Artist Sharing Her Victorian Garden on Canvas and Clay
Currently exhibiting at The Biscuit Factory in Newcastle, artist Shirley Vauvelle wants to share her garden with you
Currently exhibiting at The Biscuit Factory in Newcastle, Shirley’s collection ‘Source Material’ is the largest show of her work to date; we talked to her to find out more behind the art.
Tell us how your garden has influenced your work, and how you came up with ‘Source Material’?
I started to think about the history of the plants within my garden, some have been here for maybe 200-odd years, some were planted here by the generations before and some we brought from the other house. Friends have given us plants, and I’ve propagated plants. Some are self-seeded by birds coming in. So there’s all of this behind the material that starts to work in your mind when you’re painting it, which I find fascinating.
I did a series of paintings then I thought, well, I want to link that up with the sculpture. Within the exhibition, there will be an element of that thought process in the main body of work.
The Source Material title came from thinking about that context. And I thought, ‘this is my source material’. It’s a simple thing really. Painting a still life really doesn’t interest me but if you actually think about the context of where that jug came from or where those plants come from, it kind of extends your thought process, when you’re looking at the still life or whatever you might be painting.
Do you have a favourite viewpoint in your garden?
It changes all the time, from day to day. That’s what I love, watching that. I’m never short of inspiration. That’s because I’m surrounded by so much beauty all the time here. I’m very, very lucky. Every day there’s little changes in colour, little changes in light. Things exposed. Things covered. For a long period of time now, I’ve not been short of inspiration, which is lovely.
How does your creative process differ when you’re painting compared to when you’re working with clay?
The surface of the canvas is very similar to the surface of clay. I look at them both as canvases really. It’s just a very different animal of materials. Clay goes through very wet, kind of more pliable, then leather hard, then it goes really chalky and dirty and powdery. Whereas paint is none of that, it stays more or less in the same state unless you want to water it down.
The actual process, for me, I don’t feel there’s much difference mentally. There’s a signature style there that you can see in both the paintings and sculpture. Also I’m using plants within the surface of the sculptures – I usually use physical plant materials and I’m painting plant materials most of the time. The through-line is my subject matter. That’s the connection really.
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Find more of Shirley’s work here, and find out more about her exhibition at the Biscuit Factory here.
