Vanya Lambrecht Ward

Visual Arts

2021

About the Artist(s)

Vanya Lambrecht Ward’s work investigates our relationship with our environments and this, includes our intertwined relationship to and with fungi.

Over the past few years she has extensively researched and explored the vast and relatively unchartered territory of the mycological kingdom through a variety of mediums and approaches. She is interested in the roll of these microorganisms and their fruiting bodies in our evolution to date and into our future thinking. How and what we can learn (not use) from the funga, and how we create new connections with our more than human partners in nature and repair our distorted relationship to waste, decay and renewal and other associated biological processes.

Vanya approaches her subject matter through a large variety of forms, materials and techniques and sees them as languages that help form and develop these ideas, narratives and communications. The book form often reappears in Vanya’s work and she is currently working on a (longterm) series of book-works that will function as containers for written responses to the on-going research, citizen science, fungal activism, visual explorations that emerge from the studio.

Vanya’s studio practice involves photography and drawing, sculpture and installations as well as social and collaborative practices and writing. She has exhibited across Ireland and abroad and her work is included in private and public collections, including most recently, Trinity College Dublin. Vanya holds Bachelors Diplomas in both Fine Art and Architecture and a MA (Contemporary Art) from NCAD. She is also a lecturer at the Yeats Academy of Arts, Design and Architecture (YAADA) at IT Sligo.

Over the course of the last four years I have tentatively been expanding my work into the area of mycology. Evolving from years of preoccupation with erosion, phenomenology and perceptions of our built and natural environments. Through the lens of systems and symbiosis, I am re-approaching these ideas with the help of the still relatively unexplored world of mycology. Exploring not only the physiology and materiality of fungi but their systems, cycles and language I endeavour to know and work with fungi in a broad yet particular manner. These new works will hopefully contribute to the contemplations on how our world and theirs intersect and relate as well as help to approach things anew.

For the Dock commission I will continue the on-going investigations and research related to these fungal connections. This work, although specific and microscopic (or completely invisible) can also be viewed through a theoretic and all-encompassing lens creating a holistic understanding of the relationships with all the participants of the ecosystems (that of course we ourselves are a part of). I will develop a series of response-works that will draw on this accumulated research, through photography and drawing as well as other mark making skills and techniques prompted by the environments and its players. These pieces will later form the foundations and feed into the book-works and further ideas that, like mushrooms, gradually grow and emerge.