about
Artist Bio
Victoria Skinner has been the recipient of several artists grants, including a National Endowment for the Arts regional grant, two State of Florida individual artist fellowships, and the South Florida Cultural Consortium grant. She has exhibited and won many awards nationally, and is in private and public collections including the MacArthur Foundation, Arizona State University, and the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale.
Victoria was born in N.Y., and attended Northwestern University, Arizona State University, and received her MFA from the Maryland Institute, College of Art. She was a professor of art in Pennsylvania and Florida for many years, teaching drawing, painting and design. She currently maintains a studio near Asheville, NC.
“Victoria Skinner’s collages are glowing and mysterious, like bejeweled shadow boxes replete with fantastic and bizarre treasures…At the heart of her collages is this compelling visual metamorphosis. It’s a change from a recognizable place recorded by photography to a unique place suffused with fantasy and dream. …The transformation she works on these bits of other things becomes a metaphor for the alchemy- and risks- of art itself.”
- Elisa Turner
The Eye Drawer
Process Lists
Artist Statement
I enjoy blurring boundaries between human and animal, science and art, imagination and knowledge. A composition begins as a response to the materials before me; primarily small shapes cut from books, magazines and other photographic sources. I place myself in an atmosphere of ideas, gleaned mostly from reading, but also from music, film, visual art, and occasionally the real world. Then I let the process happen, trusting that “accident favors the prepared mind.”
My work reflects long held interests in animal life and nature, art history, pattern and texture. Much of my work deals with interrelationships of creatures, whether they are humans, animals or something in between. They present themselves in “open narratives.”
Some pieces involve nature in a more elusive form. I have always been intrigued by the microscopic world, how the life forms that are part of our everyday reality are much spookier than contrived monsters. Some of the most sinister of these are viruses, bacteria and assorted pathogens. The word “spore” is threatening to us, even if we can’t picture exactly what one looks like.
Recently, insects have become part of my work, as harbingers of an unsustainable future. As a gardener, I spend a lot of time thinking about which plants will help them to survive.
Chimerical entities, which have always been part of my work, became more interesting to me when they became real. There is a difference between a symbolic being of the imagination, and the existing reality. Today, scientists are creating chimeras, part human, part animal.
Cyanotype collage and some digital work have become common mediums, using layering and reconfiguring elements electronically and by hand. Installation pieces give me a chance to play in three dimensions and push my work in different directions.
I hope to achieve a balance between apprehension and amusement, the disturbing and the beautiful. Max Ernst called such pictures “found objects” from the unconscious.
Studio Drawers
Lira the Studio Dog
