Sculpture & Installation Statement

Valerie Wilcox is an abstract, mixed media artist who uses mainly salvaged and unexpected, humble materials to create a reimagined understanding of our constructed environment and how our brain works to piece together diverse elements. Observing what is around her in any environment, Wilcox is able to see unique opportunities with these found materials that may not otherwise have any importance in our world of hyper-consumerism. While working to expand the visual significance or value of the piece, there's an exploratory mix of painting, sculpture, craft and installation. This work is often hard to categorize other than as a very personal, individual voice simply positing the outcomes as something more than immaterial, and having fun while doing it.

 

​

Sculptural Scribbles Series
Wilcox's abstract, contemporary sculpture series called "Sculptural Scribbles" is born from a love of the line. By taking the line off the page, and while working with materials that are traditionally used in drawing such as pencil (graphite), pastel, ink and paper, she's transformed the two-dimensional drawing into a thoroughly engaging (three-dimensional) sculptural experience. The linear shapes, when influenced by light, come alive and dance on the surface beneath to create a whole new drawing of their own.

 

“These three-dimensional works by Valerie Wilcox are table-top size, kind of
human scale--if you think of your own rib cage. They are delicate, linear,
suggesting a kind of evanescence in the spontaneity and whimsy with which
the line meanders from its one end to the other, a squiggle brought to life.
They seem to want to bend and squeeze, with a slightly eerie life of their own.
They also work inventively with their own shadows which, when cast upon
the pedestal, become the two-dimensional drawings that the lines no longer
are, since they found their third dimension. Their slender, fragile quality,
white as bone, can take the mind back through eons of time to the dinosaurs,
making something very big and mythical and ancient out of something quite
small and new. There is at the same time, in these works, a beguiling lack of
sculptural pretension and a humorous creature-liness that makes them at once
seductive and revealing, playfully challenging to both the eye and the
inquiring mind.”

– Peter Clothier, author, art critic

​

​

Migratory Marks Installation Series
Wilcox’s installation series, “Migratory Marks” blurs the line between drawing and sculpture and takes you on a spontaneous journey through line, light and space.

 

Made from clay and covered in graphite, each sculpted “pencil mark” communicates its distinctive gestural energy which gives it a unique life of its own, yet is part of a larger whole. These marks play inventively with their own shadows which, when cast upon the wall, become two-dimensional representations of the original drawings. Together, all these elements become a collective force, suggesting a kind of group migration that twists, turns, curls and bends in and around the space, engaging you in a whimsical, yet refined excursion to an unknown destination.