Virginia Warwick

About the Artist

A prankster at heart, Virginia Warwick first started performing, creating characters and storylines while growing up in Frederick, Maryland. In high school one could spot her on the streets handing out free cheese dressed as the infamous “Professor Cheese”. Growing up she grew to love wildlife and nature, evident from her past history of pets, which included everything from quails to guinea pigs. While earning her degree at University of Maryland, College Park, she gravitated towards performance art and sculpture. At Rinehart School of Sculpture, she refined her practice and started using fictional narratives transforming them into outlandish performances and sculptures, giving voice to those who cannot speak, giving life to inanimate objects. Her work has been shown at such places as the Arlington Arts Center, ConnerSmith, Edison Place Gallery, Hood College, Goucher College. City Arts Gallery, Metro Gallery, Creative Alliance, Current Gallery, 14kt Cabaret, Visarts at Rockville, the Delaplaine Arts Center and at Ruby Projects. She has been included in the Transmodern Festival in Baltimore multiple years and has participated in two performance arts festivals in New York. One at the Brooklyn International Performance Arts Festival in New York City and the other at the Infridgement Festival in Buffalo, New York. She recently completed her first international art residency in Tuscany, Italy at the La Baldi artist residency.

Artist's Statement

Concentrated mainly within a three-dimensional realm, Virginia Warwick’s practice juxtaposes playfulness, humor, and earnest themes of nature. Virginia explores the ways that either art objects or bodies as performances take up space. The materials and mediums that Virginia uses are central to the meaning behind her work. Many of the materials are found, transformed and, or unrecognizable from their original form into something new.  This demonstrates her feelings about nature and animals and how the materials she uses, which are familiar to humans are in fact detrimental to the environment. Conceptually in her paintings, this also translates into which objects, animals, and natural forms are transformed by scale or in juxtaposition to one another. Growing up surrounded by a variety of animals and the natural world, Virginia feels animals and nature are an intrinsic part of her identity and weaves them into her world. This fascination and awe become part of the three-dimensionality and exploration that Virginia pursues in performance and practice.