Victoria Albuquerque

Victoria is a British visual artist, painter, photographer, and qualified architect. She is now mainly an oil painter, using water-based oils for health and environmental reasons. Colour is very important to her work, which is primarily observational, making reductions in her paintings to make clearer compositions. Her primarily concern is to comprehend and represent the interaction of form, space and colour, using sketching, photography or model-making to observe. Victoria is currently exploring themes of identity: what it is to be a woman, a mother, a sister, a daughter, a homeowner, a home-maker. What do these titles mean and how do they manifest themselves in our lives? Through an earlier training in psychology and psychotherapy Victoria explores what it means to have a sense of self, and how it manifests itself in the world we create around us. These observations touch not only on issues of self-understanding but also heritage and history, and the incomplete and subtle ways in which knowledge is handed down from one generation to the next. In Victoria’s work this sometimes appears (or disappears), leading to questions about whether the image is representing something from current reality: observation – or from personal or hand-me-down (collective) memory: imagination. Victoria’s paintings of the last 18 months depict fragments of familiar domestic environments often devoid of people to make physical the momentary sensation of the familiar which is often overlooked and to make it considered, noticed, and thought about. Lewes, East Sussex