I began painting in earnest when I moved to a rural area and found, over time, with all the nuances of spending every day in the woods, that wilderness is conceptual.  As someone who came from theatre and created dynamic stories, making paintings based on the landscape is a very natural, artistic evolution for me. The land lives in our imaginations and has as much to do with our inner lives as with the temporal world. 

I create markers on the land. My huts/shacks are just vestigial places where people have or may come to thrive.  They are “shaped architectural delineation of skin, absorbent and refined toward a cosmology of indwelling” (Marilynn Cherry 2021). Through layers of paint, they become a metamorphic skin signaling these ideas: home, cottage, shelter, camp, headstone, and crypt.  For me the people that inhabit these paintings are myself and viewers who stand before them.  Complete the story I say through paint.

All my work from the very beginning has conveyed ideas of place; who are we in our place, what is our place when we are here, how does place transform over time and how does that transformation impact us? 
Painting feels now like a push toward eternity, a remapping of my own being and a readying for the rest of the path I am on.  All my work has always been a ‘palimpsest’.  Like sedimentary layers of rock I believe painting is part of an ever evolving story about our planet and our time on it.

Bio

Victoria Ward was born in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada. A painter primarily, Ward still writes and contributes to catalogues, cultural journals and digital sites across Canada. She lives near Algonquin Park in a log cabin with her partner Gary Blundell. 

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