Andrea V. Wright’s practice is all about contrasts and contradictions and this is very much rooted in her own character. Her formative years were precarious and unstable - her family moved around a lot before settling in London.
London in the 1980s thronged with street-style, culture and tribe identity, authenticity and detail. Everything from the cut of your clothes to your hair had to be just right. Having very little money at that time, Andrea would rummage through jumble sales, markets and charity shops for vintage items, adapting clothes, being creative and throwing things together.
These multifaceted elements and voices are woven into her practice. Her work suggests a veiled architecture that reflects the body’s structure and stance. Rigid substrates contrast against the soft supple weight of powdered latex rubber, pointing to the ways that we drape our own bodies in an attempt to disguise what lies within. The seen and the unseen, the experienced and the intangible are her building blocks, presenting a vertical stage onto which crafted or industrially manufactured materials are wrapped, pinned and draped. The formal language inherent in her work contrasts with the handmade that brings a human, soulful quality to it, reflecting the relationship between the human form and the physical & emotional spaces we inhabit.
Controlled and uncontrolled elements are evidenced as much in the execution of her work as in the choice of component parts. The ‘ritual’ of casting a surface with liquid latex lends another kind of reading, disrupting the ‘clean’ lines and slick surfaces of the machine-made rubber with this other decaying, accreted, slightly grubby element, messing with aesthetic appearance and almost ruining it.
Andrea V. Wright’s intention is to create volume and depth whilst exposing and acknowledging the inherent ‘flatness’ in the materials and this is clearly visible in the density, movement and weightlessness of each piece. Revealing painterly qualities through assembly of materials also reveals the inner and outer self.