Art from the heart
Sarah Catherall talks to Fleur Wickes, who offsets life’s brutal side by creating works infused with love and made with passion.
Fleur Wickes combines her two greatest passions – words and art – in the poignant works she creates for homes. The Whanganui-based artist is a talented writer whose short stories and poems have been published in literary magazines. About seven years ago, she began drawing her words into art works, the typography reflecting the emotion of each sentence or expression she wanted to convey.
She says: ‘‘I began drawing the words I saw in my head, their meaning expressed via their literal meaning as well as the shape I drew them in. Now my art is word and image and photograph and drawings all together. All of it coming together to say what’s true for me.’’
Last year, she created a print for her son, David, for his 14th birthday. It read: ‘‘Because I love you’’. That card inspired a series of expressions she now sells as art cards – ‘‘because you’re kind’’, and ‘‘because you’re funny’’, for example.
‘‘All my work comes from a place in my life. I’ve never just seen words on a page,’’ she explains.
In October 2016, Wickes created a series for her mother, Colleen, who was dying. She wrote simple words and expressions, exploring the universality of grief – an art work that read ‘‘I’m with you’’ hung next to another that said: ‘‘As you lay your dark head down, remember me.’’
On her website, the 38-year-old writes a moving catalogue.
‘‘I made this work, wrote the words in the catalogue, to comfort myself, as a way to process the awful outrageous idea that this woman who is my rock and constant may actually leave us soon. I imagine her whispering the words I drew in the artworks to me, gently in my ear, all the days of my life. Even when she is gone. Especially when she is gone. This one’s for you Mum.’’
She reflects: ‘‘I wanted to create the show while she was still alive, so I could tell her how I felt.’’
Wickes also has a background in photography, and part of her process is photographing the works she creates on paper before transferring them to her computer. Growing up in Palmerston North, she studied photography when she left school and spent two decades working as a portrait photographer in Wellington, before she turned to snapping weddings.
One of the hardest jobs she has ever done, she says: ‘‘I love the occasion of weddings but there is so much pressure on the day and it got to the point where I couldn’t do it any more.’’
However, that did give her great insights into
love – an emotion she describes as complex. ‘‘A lot of my work is about love, which is a counterpoint to what is hard and brutal in life. The words I create are imperfect, because love is imperfect.’’
Colin McCahon, master of art and typography, has always been her greatest inspiration. ‘‘I’m embarrassed to say he is an influence.’’
‘‘My pieces are purposefully rough and raw, rather than designed. I think words are just beautiful,’’ she says.
Wickes is ‘‘proudly’’ not a fine artist, nor does she consider herself a writer. However, she writes in a journal for about an hour a day. She has started experimenting with painting, and also begun embroidering some of her works. Although she doesn’t call it ‘‘painting’’ , rather ‘‘markmaking with paint’’.
To make her art and studio prints, she writes the words with either white chalk, pencil or paint, transferring the image to her computer. The words are often white chalk smudged on black, reflecting the complexity of life, evidenced by the art print: ‘‘Something beautiful I found here’’.
She writes about the inspiration for this piece, saying: ‘‘There is beauty everywhere in this life, if you choose to see it. On my dark days, this artwork has been a reminder to look. I’ve had some very dark, very tough, bloody awful times in my life.’’
A graduate of Victoria University’s Institute of Modern Letters course in the 1990s, Wickes deliberately avoids cliches. She won’t wholesale her works, nor will she create what she calls ‘‘chocolate box’’ pieces.
‘‘I want people to connect emotionally with my work. It’s my hope for my work that it touches someone, makes them feel. How it feels is everything.’’
Instead, the artist often holds pop-up exhibitions in people’s homes. She thinks her works are best viewed in a domestic space, appreciated in the intimacy of a home setting. ‘‘You can make art that is intelligent but mine is from the heart.’’