Viky Garden, was born in Wellington and currently lives in Auckland.
A painter for some 25 years, Garden has been a finalist in the NZ Adam Portrait Awards three times (1992, 2014 and 2016).
Her entry in 2016, You See My Love, was one of a series of works where Garden used personal love letters beneath the skin. “fleeting, floating words like thoughts in our heads, imprinted – some readable, many blurred.”
“Always struck by the contemporary nature of Katherine Mansfield’s letters to John Middleton-Murry, I reread both volumes and felt her cry when she wrote to him a month before dying, ‘is there a me?’” This is the letter Garden inscribed under the skin in her work You See My Love, which was exhibited in the Katherine Mansfield exhibition in the NZ Portrait Gallery Wellington in 2018. It reads:
You see my love, the question is always: Who am I? and until that is discovered I don’t see how one can really direct anything in oneself. Is there a Me? One must be certain of that before one has a real unshakeable leg to stand on. And I don’t believe for one moment these questions can be settled by the head alone. It is this life of the head, this intellectual life at the expense of all the rest which has got us into this state. How can it get us out of it? I see no hope of escape except by learning to live in our emotional and instinctive being as well, and to balance all there. You see, if I were allowed one single cry to God, that cry would be: I want to be REAL. Until I am that I don’t see why I shouldn’t be at the mercy of old Eve in her various manifestations for ever. (Katherine Mansfield to John Middleton-Murry, 26 December 1922)
Almost exclusively using herself as the subject in her work, Garden explores themes of impermanence, self-image, introspection and the female experience.
Garden’s use of shadow in a contemporary narrative – the Greek inspired silhouettes of her Passengers series (2009) and the reinvented darker nursery Nature-Nurture images (2010) – was her entrée into abstract portraiture, inviting a reconsideration of painting method and composition. In 2015 oils were replaced by liquid acrylics and brushes with bits of card, and a new approach was born. Garden’s recent works offer a rich interplay between gestural mark-making and representation. Her lively brushstrokes simultaneously reveal and conceal the subject, achieving a fine balance that preserves their ambiguity.
The sheer concentration on her subject matter – self-portraiture – shows a remarkable discipline in Garden’s artistic practice, which is carried through to her work’s titles. Each piece is described only by the month and year in which it was completed. This choice of marking time amplifies the transitory nature of one’s self, and the inevitability of change – ideas that are both personal to the artist and universally understood, locking together the maker and the viewer.
VIKY GARDEN PAINTINGS, includes works from 2011 through to the present day, allowing us to experience this universal journey through a singular but intimate perspective.
Garden’s work is held in private collections in New Zealand, Australia, UK, Canada, USA and Europe.