In “Through th
e Looking Glass” by Lewis Carroll, Alice finds that her imaginative musings about the Looking-glass House do more than fill a dull afternoon; they open up a portal to another world. Her adventures start with the familiarity of her drawing room, but lead her through the looking-glass into a world where anything could happen and frequently did.
Drawing on Alice’s example, Victoria Scholes creates sculptural works that explore the tension between the things that define and shape us as people, and our need to escape from these things. With Victoria’s Swathe series, laborious processes shape the work; cutting, arranging, constructing, but there are also elements that stray from the predicted path – tufts of glass wander from the regimented rows, and reflections throw green fire back up out of the bucket in which cut elements are contained.
Victoria’s work always begins with that which is familiar – the everyday things that make up the fabric of our existence – but she looks for ways that the imagination can transform what we think we already know into something new and different. She makes things that people recognise but that are clearly something else too – exactly what is up to the viewer to decide. Victoria works on the basis that it is where the imagination works on what we think of as mundane or familiar that the seeds of change are sown, and new ways of thinking and being are opened up.
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