Vicki Mangan is a painter and printmaker, writer, and educator living and working in Ōtautahi Christchurch. Her printmaking and painting focus is the dialogue between detailed mark making and abstract, painterly passages. Through her practice, Vicki seeks to reframe our relationship with the natural world, encouraging the ordinary to be seen as beautiful and meaningful, and challenging engagement with the physical environment through geopoetical ideas.

Drypoint is central to Vicki’s printmaking practice. This intaglio process involves scratching lines into plastic sheets, into which ink is rubbed and then transferred onto damp archival-quality paper through the press. Her process incorporates the scratched matrix alongside areas where ink is left on or added to the surface, as well as sections where ink is removed entirely, resulting in unique drypoint monoprints.

Vicki’s work is inspired by the stark landscape and distinctive ecology of the Whakaraupō Banks Peninsula region. A significant aspect of her practice is concerned with reframing subjects that are seemingly insignificant and often overlooked. Part of the appeal lies in the fact that areas of Banks Peninsula occupied by Muehlenbeckia are classified as ‘grey scrub habitat’, with flora considered aesthetically insignificant. When viewed from a distance, her work often appears abstract, but it rewards closer inspection—much like the flora of Aotearoa New Zealand itself. At a distance, endemic plant life becomes dematerialised, with illusions of texture shifting as the viewer’s proximity to the work changes.

Working across a range of mediums allows Vicki to draw on the diverse interests developed through her BFA (Hons) in Painting and BA in Literature. Her work is haptic and experimental in process, often veering toward abstraction in practice, except in her commissioned and portrait work.