Vikki Wiercinski

1. Mural
2. Public Art
3. Visual Art

Neon Sky Public Art Mural

14 metres x 12.5 metres

This mural is based on my personal drawing project, Neon Prairie, and expanded to fit a 40-foot tall wall above an interior swimming pool. Commissioned by the Edmonton Arts Council for the Jasper Place Leisure Centre in Edmonton, AB. 

➝ At some point I wanted my drawings to go big or go home. As they say: careful what you wish for, as a 14-metre wide, 12-metre high mural commission may appear. It will take three years to happen. You will mix gallons of custom paint colours by hand from base colours. Your colleague Jennifer Konanz will sweat it out with you high up on the scaffolding above a drained pool for an entire month getting it done. It will be a wild time, I promise.

My drawings are based in nature, and The Neon Sky is a brightly patterned modern drawing of a prairie skyscape. I am inspired by the daily interactions with nature Edmontonians are afforded, but I also know too well how we are often are forced inside due to our winter weather. In treating the pool as a year-round “lake” and recreation area, the thing we are missing to feel like we are outdoors is the sky. I imagine swimmers emerging from the water and having a moment where they are transported to the expansive outdoors, to the sunsets and big skies of summer by looking at this piece.

A swimmer myself, I also think of the effervescence of being under water, of the feeling of floating by, stroke by stroke - there is an airiness to the mural. The joy of abstract shapes is that any viewer can see anything in them, and hopefully the shapes reflect back something of themselves.

I am grateful to the Edmonton Arts Council for the commission, and to the City of Edmonton.

1. Visual Art
2. Drawing
3. Landscape

Selected Drawings
2016-present

My art practice took shape years after my creative education was complete. My drawings and paintings are made in the landscape where I live and while in the pattern and rythm of nature. These instinctual, meditative drawings are the basis for an Edmonton Arts Council public art commission for a 14-metre wide interior mural above the pool deck at the Jasper Place Leisure Centre in Edmonton, Canada.

Noteably my drawing practice has taken me on an art residency to Arteles Centre in Finland as well as the Banff Centre for the Arts. I was pleased to also lend a drawing to Glass Salt’s tape casette album greetings. 

All drawings are made with ink, marker and acrylic paint on paper.

1. Public Art
2. Surface Design
3. XL Work

Midnight Dispatch Public Art Piece

Lewis Farms Fire Hall • Edmonton. Canada
Repeating pattern at 2m x 3m
Installed Spring 2016

Dipping an entire building in pattern is an opportunity worth taking on - just sayin’. Commission by the Edmonton Arts Council to design a pattern for the exterior concrete cladding of the Lewis Farms Fire Hall. There is a nice writeup about the piece on their blog.

Much of my inspiration for the final piece was thinking about the Northern Lights and starry skies on a crisp, clear Alberta night. Maybe you’re standing in your backyard and you’re just in awe of what you see above you - you’ve forgotten about the chill for a moment. And it’s a very common experience that many take for granted - not many people in Canada, let alone the world, live at the latitude to see Northern Lights regularly. I think as Albertans we live for those moments.

Aesthetic considerations aside, the design had to have manufacturing considerations tightly in mind as it needed to translate into a casting mold, and be stamped into the concrete panels forming the exterior cladding of a large portion of Lewis Farms Fire Hall building.

Working in-depth with the architectural design team on the building project, I created this design through a collaborative process that included concept presentations to the architecture team and further refinements from those conversations. Being a designer-artist hybrid made this back and forth process very comfortable.

1. Ceramics
2. Are
3. Fun

➝ Art Practice

Ceramics

The joys (and pains) of ceramics are endless! My ceramic pieces take the shape of abstract shapes integrated with climbing rope, with which I’m completely obsessed with and have a serious collection of in my studio. The mishima technique allows me to introduce drawing to clay. I am learning to make glazes, lustres are neat, and I’m starting to pigment my slipcasts. Ceramicists know: this will all take a lifetime to figure out.

︎ Some pieces pictured here were made at the Banff Centre in 2018 as part of a visual art residency, where I discovered ceramics.

︎ In 2023, I was invited by my friend Yumi Arai to exhibit my ceramics/rope sculptures in her gallery space Suro in Tsukuba, Japan. The resulting exhibition <<GOLD DUST>> was entirely transported in my carry-on luggage! 

2023 ---
Essay for
ORNAMENT AND CRIME
Exhibited at
Alberta Craft Council 
Edmonton and Calgary, Alberta

Adolf Loos once wrote that "the time spent on embellishment of objects is wasted time and wasted health of the maker". It is apparent that Loos was not able to experience the mediative contentment of creating repeating marks, of going where your curiosity guides you, and creating intuitive pieces rooted in experimentation. To restrict ornament is to limit joy.

As a designer, I have been trained in clean and modernist visual ideas, and as an artist and ceramicist I have chosen to break out of this mould. I seek visual balance between ornament and simplicity, and my ceramic sculptures are plain in shape and wild in markmaking, colour and drawing. The sculptures are a thought frozen in time, and I think of them as a slice of preserved energetic motion. Perhaps they are a portal to another universe? Beginning with torn paper collage, I combine layers of lines, freehanded cloudy contrasting glaze forms and gold lustre at random onto the slipcast forms.  In using a geometric ceramic form as a structure for erratic surfaces, I allow myself endless experimentation within basic shapes. I decline to leave simple forms with simple surfaces.

Many of my sculptures are only complete when woven through with ropes and cordage, introducing an unexpected element of machine-made readymade materials into craft pieces. Allowing for the everyday world to intermingle with craft is an expression of my reality, and invites the viewer to contemplate how familiar materials can be repurposed into the unexpected, and how we can see our material world in a different way. ︎