VIVIENNE LIGHT
Summary & Artist Statement

Born in West Dorset, Vivienne Light studied music and art while at Dartington College of arts in the 1960s. Both subjects remain an integral part of her life. Indeed, in recent years, she has become increasingly aware of music's role in her art. Both, as she points out, share a common theoretical and emotive language. Vocabulary can easily slip between the two, words such as rhythm, transition and dissonance.  

            
Vivienne aims to create compositions of harmony and balance while using opposing and conflicting materials; a situation which she sees echoed in the landscape. The media she works with is variable:  from handmade papers formed on copper moulds, discarded and worn beach objects found on the coast of Dorset, paint, metals, threads, fabric, ground stone and even plastics and rubber. Texture and tonal relationships are paramount.

(detail)

She now divide her time between exhibiting, writing reviews and art books, curating exhibitions and managing Canterton Books.

In all that she does she is increasingly aware of words by the New Zealand painter Frances Hodgkins:

‘the difficulty is to be yourself, assimilate all that is helpful but keep your own individuality…its one's only chance'.