Vicky Price explores the visual dialogue between human beings and landscape, vista and found geological materials, using drawing and the processes of making printed textile surfaces in varying scales as an expressive tool, creating physical weight and transparent delicacy to create space and environments for an interactive viewer experience. She plays with cloth and material innovation that responds to a place, creating industrial-influenced interpretations and collections of found materials, transforming them as powders and liquids into large-scale drawings, prints and textile sculpture with a craft-like maker attention to quality and heritage traditions. Her deep interest in science and colour led to her study textile chemistry with the Society of Dyers and Colourists.
Born in North Yorkshire, she spent many years as an outdoor kid, training and competing in high-level cross-country running, gig rowing and team sports, until she attended art college in 1991. After studying fine art printmaking in Sheffield 1997, she left for a travelling life in Europe. She continued to keep sketchbooks and enjoyed a transient existence, accompanied by friends, dogs, a collection of mountain bikes and a kayak - with many interesting stories to recall.
During this time, she absorbed changing localities, developing a cross-fertilisation of ideas around culture, heritage and architecture and geological surroundings, with further spatial influences of natural gorges and valleys. She was influenced by the enormity of human endeavour to carve dwellings from the rock face of Siurana, a tiny town located in a high region of Tarragona Province and the gestural works of Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona, that searches for traces of human gesture.
Since 2016 she has produced large-scale print works for research, projects and clients, using screen print for immediacy and the flexibility to adapt between surfaces and printed colour. She has developed co-created works with other makers and artists in upholstery and fashion, showcasing exhibits at The National Centre for Craft. In 2018 she was awarded a UK Textile Society Postgraduate Bursary for her eco-print developments using recovered large-format digital inks and landfill silk. Vicky continues to develop her project ‘drawing in a three-dimensional world’ through Arts Council England funding and a QEST scholarship.
She is most productive when drawing and the textile print intertwines with science-like processes as a means to re-rendering textile design, working with ancient process technologies and investigating how these can be revived as a new promotion of eco-sustainable developments. Through print she uses physical making and movement, Vicky endeavours with rigour and play to create the next best innovation in new surface design and material matter. With a constant search for pre-consumer waste textiles - often destined for landfill, Vicky’s over-arching aim is to hand-print onto waste fabrics to produce beautiful prints, that look digital but are skillfully hand manufactured.
