FLEUR WICKES

SINCE 1989

I’ve been making art in one form or another since 1989.

I was a portrait photographer at the beginning. For two decades I made beautiful photographs and showed people their own beauty. I wrote on the side. Short stories, poems. One day, for almost no reason, I began drawing the words I wrote. Roughly, and without much thought. I delighted in what I saw on the page. Followed that feeling.

Thirteen years on, and I’ve made a career and a studio as an artist working in word and image, using photography, drawing and painting as my medium.

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, can’t articulate in any other way. To release darkness. To admit delight. To let go. 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. My work reaches something deep down that I need to touch in order to heal, but can’t reach by any other means.

My work is made in counterpoint to all that is tough difficult brutal in this life. 

It's my way out of the dark. 

It’s necessary like breathing.

It’s my form of prayer.

BIO, AKA THIS LIFE UNFOLDING

If you feel like trawling through my incomplete and slightly haphazard bio, you'll find it here .

FLEUR WICKES STUDIO

My studio manager, Jane, and I work from this beautiful sprawling studio in the heart of small-town New Zealand, Whanganui. This town’s like a warm bath, and I love the light and quiet and room to breathe.

I’ve set the studio up to function as a space for the making of my art, the storage and sending out of it to all the people around NZ and overseas who decide to have it for their own, and also to look and feel like an apartment. My work is domestic in nature and made for the real homes of real people. It makes sense to show it in a space that’s got a homely human vibe. Context is everything.

By Siana Clifford, Dish magazine , March 2021

New Zealand’s first Covid-19 lockdown in March and April 2020 was a challenging time for everyone and Fleur was no different.

“I found that I experienced every single emotion during lockdown, but that it was all heightened because of the situation – there was no distraction or relief. Lockdown was a beautiful tender time for me, very much in love with my partner and living in a home in the treetops. But just because we were at home, life didn’t stop. I still felt times of deep grief, I still experienced the terrible nightmares that are common for me.”

Harnessing those emotions, Fleur created a new collection with only an A4 notebook and some coloured pencils. Her daily drawings, posted each evening on Instagram, are now collected in artist book [Parentheses].

“I regularly post on social media, and I began the [Parentheses] drawings by doing one the first evening of lockdown. I’m not even sure why I did that first one. I had no intention of a series. I did another the next day, and another the next. Then I decided I would give myself the discipline of doing one every single day. Doing the drawing and writing the posts became an anchor for me. A way to connect with others during this event every one of us was going through.”

A desire to connect is a common thread in Fleur’s work but her earliest ambitions involved human connection of a different kind.

“I wanted to be a doctor and studied all the sciences. Then at 16, after my sister’s friend told me I’d be good with a camera… From the first roll of film I took, I loved it.”

Fleur’s affinity for photography resulted in her being the youngest person, at 18, to be accepted on the professional photography course at Wellington Polytechnic, where she won portfolio of the year and received a scholarship for a further year of study.

Afterwards, Fleur ran a successful business as a portrait photographer for two decades. But the artist in her was ready to emerge.

“From my teenage years I was writing poetry, I’ve loved words from since I could remember. About a decade ago, I just began drawing the words I was writing. That began my journey of expressing myself via artwork using words. The natural world is also very important to me and I love taking objects such as stones and feathers and flowers, and showing them in fine detail, blowing them up large to show how much beauty there is in the ordinary everyday.”

Fleur’s artistic process involves a unique combination of photographs, word-work, paintings, still life and her own overdrawing. “With my words, I often draw them very small, then photograph them, work on them in Photoshop, then print them large. This is to show the importance of the quiet private moments of our lives, which are equally as important as any world event. It’s about the large work allowing us to take a breath, and remember the beauty in the everyday.

“I draw or paint the words I write because the shape of the way I draw the words adds depth and layers to the meaning of the words themselves. The shape of the words themselves are like an emotional landscape. “

Overdrawing, which is where I literally draw over the top of an archival photo-rag print, adds texture, depth and layers to a photograph. It makes each print in the edition unique.

“I am starting to overdraw larger lines and symbols and words, so it is becoming more than simply texture. I love the process. “I love the imperfect perfect in artwork. To illustrate all the imperfect raw parts of us, hold that up as something to celebrate, in counterpoint to the living-our-best-lives Instagram imagery we see so much of.”

While Fleur can see the flaws in social media, she also appreciates its benefits.

“I really enjoy social media – the connection with people all over NZ and the world, the challenge of expressing something true for me in a sea of ‘perfect’ content. I love the short form of the postings. I consider the social media stuff I do as part of my artwork.

“I also find the private messages I get from people telling me what my work means to them deeply moving. I’m not that doctor I set out to be when I was 16, I’m not saving people’s lives, but it is very special to me that my artwork does sometimes make a difference to others. That it helps pull someone out of the dark.

“My artwork has for a long time been made as a way for me to step out of the dark, to focus on the light.”

For an artist who is all about the personal, it makes sense that Fleur prefers a more intimate way of showing it than the traditional gallery exhibition. The Art House concept involves setting up a series of work in someone’s home and holding viewings there.

“I believe in art in context. That is, that my artwork sings when it is seen in the places I make it for. My artwork is intended for domestic spaces, not to live their lives in museums.  It makes me happiest when I know my work is hanging on the walls of someone’s home, as a beautiful backdrop to their lives. Therefore it made sense to show my work like that.

“I also do Art Houses as a way of connecting with people. I love making in-real-life personal connection with the people who are interested in my work. Connection is everything to me.”

And this sense of connection is what makes Fleur’s artworks so special. Undoubtedly deeply personal works, they become an expression of humanity in all its messiness and glory.

“My work is a complete expression of my life, my feelings. It’s my way of understanding my world, my feelings, my self. The more personal you make artwork, the more of yourself you are expressing, the more universal it is. Because no matter who we are, we all have the common threads of love, grief, pain, joy.”

Fleur has been revisiting her earlier work, re-working some and in May will present them at her Whanganui studio in a mixed-media exhibition that will be shown in the context of her new studio.

“The studio will become kind of like a film set, a backdrop to the artwork but also saying its own thing, providing another layer of meaning.”

The collection will also be shown online, another non-traditional way of showing art.

“I think as an artist if you can release all the ways you ‘should’ be making art, all the things that are considered beautiful or intellectually rigorous, and let that fall away and just make artwork that is an expression of you, then you are getting somewhere. I’m in a new phase of my work. This new visual language I’ve stepped into, the painting and overdrawing and still lives, it’s like flying in the dark, a leap into the unknown, towards the centre of me. It’s exciting.”