Patricia Volk

"For the last fifteen years I have been more or less immersed in creating heads; flawed heroes, empowered virgins, or pensive deities, icon like but with iconoclastic human frailties. I felt they were the ideal vessels for conveying humanity through the material, but they were also my comfort zone. Now I've made a complete departure.

Though my heads were always symbolic and semi-abstract, I wanted to find out what happened if I disposed of the figurative, literal element and concentrated simply on the basic forms and lines I'd grown to love.

What I have discovered is a fascination with how one line or form has an effect upon another next to it. The juxtapositions of shape and colour create wonderful contradictions of power and fragility, stability and precariousness, their tentative proximities, frictions and “rubbing against each other” reflecting the relationships between human beings; the awkward but beautiful partnership between the strong and the weak, the delicate and the robust, creating sometimes a balanced structure that seems as if it might topple, but keeps standing. Just as in life.

The old adage is to “Do one scary thing every day.” Departing from heads (my old friends) was not easy, but I am excited that these new abstract forms are still essentially “me”. And have set me free."

Patricia Volk