Audrey Fleming though an already established practising artist, studied her BA (Hons) in Fine Art at UCA (University for the Creative Arts) at the Farnham campus in Surrey, England. She specialised in Sculpture and graduated in 2015. Upon moving home to Cork, Audrey joined an artist collective at Over the Line Studios until 2017. She was then based exclusively at the National Sculpture Factory in Cork for a number of years before joining artist friend Mick Wilkins at at his Foundry and Studios in Kilnagleary, Co.Cork. The National Sculpture Factory continues to be an excellent resource for large scale projects and exhibitions and it must be emphasised that any location which is inspirational is very often Audrey’s studio of choice.
Audrey has for much time been preoccupied with The Overlooked as a subject; photographing beautiful material and visual details that she experiences on natural and manmade surfaces. She also collects samples of beautiful materials and interesting objects. Both her photographs and sample materials inform her sculpture. Audrey finds herself showing off these beautiful overlooked details in what she hopes is an intriguing way, through the use of industrial materials such as mirror-polished stainless steel.
The underpinning aims and contexts of her work are related to current trends and debates in ‘materiality’. She is very passionate about both materials and the process of art making. Materials are most often the inspiration for her drawing, works on paper, photography and sculpture. Audrey tends to work with oppositional materials, such as Silver Birch tree bark with graph paper, wool and aluminium, for example, as well as using materials for processes they were not designed for, such as knitting with seaweed. Her practice is also consistently informed by both her relationship to nature and the landscape, as well trends and debates within contemporary art practice.
A significant element within Audrey’s practice is also her interest in engaging with advanced and experimental mould making and casting processes. She has previously cast wool in aluminium and knitted felt in bronze. More recently she was selected to take part in the IRON-R 18 project alongside numerous national and international artists where she cast Finnish Reindeer moss and various seeds and dried flowers in cast iron using sodium silicate resin bonded sand moulds. This was a unique opportunity to utilise the often underused and unappreciated medium of cast iron and has led her practice into another route of ‘medium specificity’. Audrey also loves to use casting to experience the visual and material properties of one material through the skin of another. More recently, she cast Finnish Reindeer moss and tree bark in bronze using the ancient dung mould process and is currently working on finishing these pieces in the studio.
