Vikki Drummond
From early childhood, Vikki has been exploring her creative side, opting for crayons and paints over dolls. Always a voracious reader, Vikki took a particular interest in fairy tales, loving the darkness alongside the light and shiny. As a teenager, she mostly focused on drawing skills. The art of shadowing and infusing light with a charcoal pencil formed the foundation for her future work.
Post-secondary prompted a sensible choice, and Vikki enrolled in a Business Administration program, which led to a two-decade career in sales and marketing. While her beloved art was on hold, Vikki met her adorable husband, and together they owned and operated several restaurants and a bar; raised a son and daughter; and three mutts.
Vikki never lost her love of gummy bears, strawberry lip gloss, and daily trips down rabbit holes to magical worlds she yearned to explore. In 2000, she took a part-time position with a fashion house. The work fueled a passion for costume and expressive dressing and inspired her to take her whimsical side more seriously. Most importantly, it brought her back to the power of visual storytelling.
She sold her first painting in 2012 and began working as a professional artist. In 2020, Vikki and her husband downsized to beautiful downtown Victoria, BC, where the cry of the gulls and the briny kiss of ocean air inspired Vikki in mystical ways. She brings a belief in both the beauty and the absurdity of our human world to the canvas, convening with magical creatures and dark monsters in equal measure.
She realized a lifelong dream when she opened her own studio in historic Fan Tan Alley. Her pieces have been selected for public display by the City of Victoria, featured on a beer can label with Bones Brewery, and collected as far away as Australia, Saudi Arabia, Europe, and New York.
Artist Statement
Distortion and excavation are at the core of my practice. Societal behaviour is bizarre to me and life as a whole, beautifully absurd. I playfully explore our human struggle with identity—the ancient questions of essentialism in philosophy; the essence of a thing vs. the image it conveys. The shapes and imagery make suggestions about being human but ultimately leave interpretation for the viewer, allowing for themes of loss, regret, escape, protection, faith, mischief, and storytelling.
This current series incorporates the shapes of the ’70s that I grew up with. I combine a nostalgic visual narrative of the décor and design that informed my impressionable years with a reinterpretation of portraiture. By representing life through unconventional physicalities and a signature distortion, I attempt to create a visual emotional history of our times.
Each painting is a representation of how my imagination assembles impression, memory, and experience into visual form. As a series of work, it becomes a narrative on the dynamics of viewership. It underlines the liquid boundary between seen and unseen, literal and psychological space, and internal vs. external identity.
https://vikkidrummondart.com/
