FLEUR WICKES

This collection is a fairly random selection from artwork I’ve made over the last decade. As it says in the picture, it’s artwork that for one reason or another means a great deal to me.

I wrote the following words as an Instagram post in 2022, and they still seem as good an introduction as any to the work.

Insert the word artwork for drawing, and you'll get the point.

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DRAWING FOR MY LIFE

“I sometimes wonder what kind of life I would have if it weren't for the relief and release I get from making my work. It allows me to say things I half the time don't even realise I need to say. To release darkness. To admit wonder. To get these big large feelings of mine out of my body. God knows what I'd do if I had to hold them all inside.

Sometimes I don't even know where the things I do come from. I have no idea why I started drawing the words I wrote. It just happened one day, and I've continued doing it for over a decade because it feels right, because it says something I need to say.“

Instagram, 28 October 2022

Because it's an extraordinary thing to me that what there is is light between us, not darkness. I never thought I could have a love like this. I never thought I'd be whole enough, brave enough, to live in the light and not the shadows. To have a partner full of gentle light himself, who prefers sunshine to bruises, but can also find beauty in the scars I carry, both inside and out.

Instagram, 14 April 2022

I got the most deeply felt message today, from a woman experiencing a great deal of trauma. This is what I replied:

“You're right, I've experienced darkness so black it nearly felt complete. I too have been broken. I know the marks and scars that kind of trauma leaves.

I'm sorry for you.

I want to say also that I'm with you.

You're not alone.

You’ve got so many who love you.

I know this for a fact.

Drink that love in.

Let it be a counterpoint. “

Instagram, 09 December 2021

This artwork is a photograph of a page in my diary which I'd popped a hydrangea leaf in a decade before. I remember the feeling I had of opening the page in the diary, being struck by the continuing beauty of the leaf, by the memory of the garden I'd made in the home I'd loved, lived, married, grieved, and raised kids in all those years before. We carry our history with us, deep in our bodies. My history is embedded in my artwork, too.

Instagram, 26 May 2022

Miss my partner tonight. So much. I'll see him on Saturday but god I wish he was here with me. So I'm posting this artwork, which I made as a bit of a siren call. This one's for you, J.

I can't wait to see you & yeah, I'm calling you home.

Instagram, 03 February 2022

A few years ago I had a temporary studio in a disused service station in a dodgy part of town. Got lots of wasted people coming in when I was working, asking if they could buy cigarettes and beer ... To amuse myself I painted 'fyi no cash drugs or flash stuff on premises got more brains that that bro chick dude' on the window ... originally it just said bro at the end, then I decided I was being sexist and added the chick. This photograph I made of it, with my reflection in it aka Orson Wells, still makes me smile everytime I look at it. And I never did get broken into, so maybe the sign worked. LOL.

Instagram 01 July 2021

Some days I’m hard on myself. Wish I was a better person.

Kinder.

More patient.

More successful. Less emotional.

More able to clean my house on the regular.

I made this artwork, “imperfect heart”, in part to remind myself that I’m okay as I am. To help me see the beauty to be found in all the dodgy flawed bits of myself I’d sometimes prefer to look away from.

It’s a good heart. Scarred and torn, but beautiful despite that.

Or maybe because of it.

Instagram, 24 January 2021

I made an artwork from these words in response to the Christchurch earthquakes 22 Feb 2011. I made posters of the artwork, sent them down to Christchurch for people to post up in the streets, in the hope I could give some small comfort to those who had lost so much. I thought it appropriate then, to post this new iteration today, exactly eleven years on. The words still fit, eh.

Instagram, 22 February 2022

For all those things

that we didn’t have

and wanted

and lost

and were never given

and had

and had taken.

For all those things

we

live.

FW.

She is about desire.

Specifically my desire.

She feels like a self-portrait, but she's not. She's a woman I photographed about twenty years ago. I'd had a small print hanging around the studio for years, then in 2022 I sat at my table and drew on her. Drew my desire on her lips and breasts. Scribbled my feeling into her skin. I'm 52 and I when I’m making love with my partner I still feel like I did two decades ago.

Desire isn't about age, or how you look.

It's about wanting and intense feeling.

I wrote the words ‘wild on solid ground’ into the paper of the artwork. Because that's how I feel in my body now, after three decades of internal work: on solid ground. Safe and tethered and therefore able to let myself go. She is large in scale because that's how big my feelings are.

I want you to see every mark and colour and line.

Instagram, 29 March 2023

This is the shape of my heart.

The way it looks

when I'm with you,

when I’m at my most

open, passionate,

tender and alive.

Instagram, 29 December 2019

I couldn't find an lnstagram post for this, which is suprising, but hey, sometimes I am quietest about the artworks I feel most deeply about.

This version of Something Beautiful is about

the red river of blood and love and fierce passion that exists deep down in our bodies.

In all of us.

To find it, we just need to look.

F.W note, 19 May 2023

I made the original photograph about a decade ago. It was a portrait, showing the young woman's entire head/torso. It was a good portrait. Over the years, I kept returning to her mouth, to the expression. Last year, I made the artwork I'd been coming to all this time, of that mouth I was so fascinated by. I wrote the word always on the artwork because this artwork represents the young young girl that I was, with all her fierce desire , and the young girl that will remain in me always.

Instagram, 20 May 2022

Holding on for dear life. Because it's a bloody good life.

Felt absolutely knackered today. So tired I just wanted to sleep but hey I needed to push on through. The exhaustion made me tearful, and a bit sorry for myself. Came across this artwork as I was working, thought it appropriate to post tonight, after a day where I felt like I was holding on by my fingernails, overdrawing, doing studio work, when all I wanted to do was cry.

I made this during the first 2020 lockdown. It's from my Parentheses series. The words are a riff on a message my best friend from high-school sent me not long before she died. Meegan was fighting for her life, battling aggressive cancer in order to stay on this earth as long as possible for her teenage boys, and still calling this life a dear one.

Meegan's determination and mental toughness was astounding, as was her beautiful love for her boys. Every time I look at this artwork, it reminds me my problems are fairly small.

Reminds me to hold on. To find the bright side. Or should I say, the Meegan side.

Instagram, 21 November 2021

I wrote these words a few years ago, when my son was a teenager in full-flight. It was so tough at times, and god how I loved him right through it all. Stars and rain is how life is eh. Can't have one without the other. Wouldn't want to. Tonight I'm most def feeling all starry. l"m feeling so proud of my now 19 year old. So proud of how he's come into himself as a person, of all the tough stuff he's pushing through. It’s a happy proud-mum kinda day.

Instagram, 01 August 2022

You are

all the stars

in the sky.

We are

in the middle

of so much rain.

This is how

the years go by.

I love you.

I've always in my life found that when you're super close to the edge of yourself, to your limit, you're also at your most open and vulnerable ... the walls become too hard to hold .

The key to making any kind of decent artwork is to stay open. Be open. It hurts sometimes, because it's sensitive as fck deep down inside, eh. But the beauty to be found im the depths is 100% worth the pain.

Instagram, 08 August 2020

This artwork came from an evening I spent in room number six, with a man who was like a stranger on a train. Something about the intensity of our union opened me up in ways I never had been before. I won't forget him, or the light. I thank him, too, for the partnership I have now. Before him, I didn't have such capacity for tenderness. I was too frightened to open, to let go. He taught me it was okay. Thank you, T, what a lovely mark you made on me.

lnstagram, 05 August 2021

Thank you

for our beautiful hours

for those walls

that came tumbling down.

It likely won’t come again

of that I’m most aware

but as I’ve already told you

you made your mark on me.

You over there

me right here.

Let’s say cheers

to room number six

and the light

through that curtain

breaking.

Someone I love very much had surgery today. He's doing okay but it's a deal, a big one. I cried last night. I cried this morning. I cried this afternoon. I'll likely cry in the dark of this evening.

On the spectrum of the amount of crying people do, I think I cry quite a lot. For me, crying is not just about sadness., it's about releasing all sorts of emotion. Tension, relief, grief, exhaustion, happiness.

Tears come, tears go. The love I feel behind all that water stays constant.

One of my favourite books is *going on a bear hunt* and as the story goes - you can't go under it, you can't go over it, you can't go around it, you gotta go through it.

Instagram, 20 February 2020

Strong spine.

Tender spirit.

FW note, 19 May 2023

This photograph is about my son and I. I'd had this beautifully shaped piece of ply leaning against my wall for a while, then one day just wrote the words directly on it, to remind myself what my son and I had between us was beautiful, at a time when our relationship was feeling rocky.

If you look closely, you'll see the light from a window above coming down onto the words, and the dust from the chalk resting on the shelf below. Isn’t it lovely.

Instagram, 19 June 2019

I made this artwork thinking about love. Thinking how whoever and whatever you love exists always. It stays with you, 24/7 365.

Even past loves are there, etched in the right -down-deep of your body.

Love matters.

Partners, kids, family, friends. Vocations.

And your self.

You matter, too.

Just as much as the rest.

Instagram, 13 March 2023

Lying in bed all cuddled up,

listening to the sound of the rain on the roof.

Doesn't get much better.

Instagram, 20 July 2020

When I first made this artwork, I thought it was a pretty picture. It was amusing to draw on a golden crown, draw some hair in a style like mine. Give her a profile like mine. Put my favourite necklace on her. Put spots on her dress like I'd always like to wear but never quite do because for the fabric to look like this in real life, it'd have to be Fortuny and I ain't got the cash for that:-)

As I write this , a couple of months after I made her, I see more clearly why I made her. Why I named her. Yes, she is a woman in the centre of her own life. Sitting in her own power, in a dress of her own making. The gold of her flickers in the light.

What I also see in this work, especially in the roughly re-drawn profile which I etched in with a small blade, is her sadness. Her blueness. She is trying very hard to keep her chin up and her crown on but make no mistake it's difficult for her. She feels the weight of of all that glittering metal.

But blue is also water, of which she is mostly made. She's surrounded by it. Its fluid qualities echo her own. The water helps balance the weight of that other blueness.

It seems to me this artwork really is a self-portrait in the deepest sense of the word. I like her a lot, this woman. I feel for her too.

This artwork is one of my favourites from the 'Home 2020' collection. It's a photograph of a print I bought at a second hand shop, which I randomly hung on the studio wall while I was renovating ...

I walked past her one day, and was struck by the beauty of the blue lady against the chaos of the background. Chaos and beauty was so exactly how 2020 felt for me, that I just had to make an artwork of it. It's called FW was here because of the graffiti-overdrawing I did on the print that you can't see in this shot. [Always wanted to be a grafitti artist but I’m way too well behaved] x

Instagram, 19 March 2021

I am most def the queen of my own country. We all should be.

This queen is large in scale, with a gold-leaf crown, flowers I etched in with a sharp blade. She sits serene in her beautiful bluegreen world. I love her.

This artwork began with a small beat-up faded print of a painting by Joanne Pemberton Longman from 1969 called ‘The sound of music’. I photographed the dodgy print, changed up the colours in photoshop, edited out the bits I didn't want, then set about printing her very large.I overdrew her waist to be bigger, her face to look more like mine in profile, her hair scratched into a bob like mine. I left the remnants of the $12 price sticker in the right hand corner, I left JPL's signature and added mine beside.

Her crown shimmers when you walk past her. She is regal and she's tough too. She inhabits an imperfect world, is as imperfect as the world she inhabits. She ain't no hothouse flower. She can roll with the punches despite the ballgown. Or maybe because of it.

The way she presents herself to the world is her protection, as well as her pleasure.

Instagram, 02 November 2022

Thinking of Christmas and what it means. Family, for sure.

Being with those we love, for sure.

But also there's belief.

Belief in the things we cannot see.

Faith in the intangible and unknowable. Love of any kind is never knowable. It's not material. It exists in our cells and our spirit. This is what this woman I drew holds in her hands. She's my Xmas angel.

Instagram, 14 December 2022

Don't know about you but I feel a pressure to be 'up' and 'on' on these social media platforms.

Truth is that this picture was how today was for me.

Down.

Difficult.

Lots of tears.

Lots of fear.

Bugger if I'm going to pretend otherwise.

Instagram, 09 August 2022

I made this thinking of someone in particular. Thinking that no matter the distance between us, we still saw the same stars, the same beautiful blue.

After I made it, I thought how we all share the same sky. No matter who we are, what we’ve got, what we’ve achieved. Or haven’t.

The thought comforts me when I’m missing someone, helps me pull my head in when I’m being a judgemental cow [which I am more often than I like to admit in the privacy of my own head].

We all share the same sky.

How fortunate we are.

Instagram, 31 October 2019

These days, I've learnt I am enough.

Learnt that there are many ways to live this life, that there are no rules about what constitutes the right way to live, the right way to be - only the rules we make up in our own heads. I made this artwork to remind myself of that.

I was walking along the river on a particularly sucky day, and was beating myself up about not being good enough. You know the kind of headtalk I mean. I looked up, and there were a few different species of birds flying. Some of them graceful and small and light, some of them fierce as fck, powering through the sky. I thought to myself, all of those birds are beautiful, all of them fly. They just got different ways to do it.

I then went to the studio to draw that feeling down.
There are so many ways to fly.

Instagram, 22 April 2022

There's always a this.

Always hurdles and roadblocks.

Very often of our own making.

Just remember

there is always another side

on the other side.

Damn beautiful it is, too.

Hold tight, mate.

You’lll get there.

F.W note, 19 May 2023

Isn't it marvellous that every single one of us, no matter our circumstance, has access to the light. I remember one day years ago, I was grieving so hard. I'd been crying most of the morning. I was in a bit of dingy flat at the time, but it had a glass back door and at a certain time of day, light fairly streamed into the hallway. So I got some cushions and lay down on them like a cat. Stayed there for an hour, just breathing and crying, releasing so much sadness. I remember how warm it was. How good I felt when I got up. Like I'd turned a corner in my grief.

It's such an ordinary thing, light.

But like most ordinary things, it's also extraordinary.

Something to be treasured.

Instagram, 12 December 2021

I made this artwork thinking of someone I consider a friend, though we've never met. I was thinking of her journey in this life so far, and everything she's been through.

These days, she's living ordinary/extraordinary days with her partner and children in a beautiful home she's created in small town New Zeland. A few years ago, this woman’s life was literally in the balance. She had young children and had to spend months in bed facing the real possibility of dying. Her life for sure didn’t unfold how she thought it would.

All the tally marks in this artwork are all our days and hours and years. They're wonky and crossed over because that's life. For all of us. The gold of the letters, which shimmer in the light, is all the imperfect beauty. There's a cross in the picture because making art is how I pray.

Instagram, 12 March 2023

These are our days.

This is your life.

Live it.

F.W note, 19 May 2023

Because

we

all

need

a

star

to

wish

on.

F.W note, 19 May 2023