close button
ARTIST

Vera Ryklova

PhotoIreland
Selected in
2020
No items found.
Vera Ryklova is a Dublin based artist, working in lens-based media. Currently undertaking MA in Art and Research Collaboration (2021) at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dún Laoghaire, she graduated from the same Institute in 2015, with a BA (Hons) in Photography.

Ryklova presented her first solo exhibition in 2018 at Triskel Arts Centre in Cork (IRL). Her work has been also featured in a number of group exhibitions held in Republic of Ireland as well as in UK, including the Royal Hibernian Academy Gallery in Dublin, the Ulster Museum in Belfast (NI/UK), and the FiLiA feminist conference in London and Manchester (UK). She was shortlisted for the Hennessy Portrait Prize in 2016, which exhibited at the National Gallery of Ireland, and she is the winner of the 2017 Hotron Art Works Prize for work by a recent graduate.

Her work was also reviewed in the photographic magazine Source under Source Graduate Photography 2015, and is included in the Art Collection of Trinity College Dublin.

In her practice Ryklova explores both the social construction of the self and the self-concept. Through the medium of her own body and using her own – subjective – experience she intimates a woman’s reality to the public eye while concerning her socially formed traits.

Performing to the camera she produces series of photographic and video self-portraits that reveals an emotional conflict driven by role expectations and embedded social practices.

The creative approach she has developed gives the camera the function of a distancing device that she utilises for her to experience a state of catharsis. She links the execution with the liberating emotional discharge. Making her work serves as a coping strategy, this adds an extremely personal aspect to her practice, but still touches on universal human experiences.

Ryklova’s activities are also engaged in curatorial practice. As a curator she presented two group exhibitions in Dublin, in 2015 at Steam Box Galleries and in 2017 at The Complex.

Originally from the Czech Republic, Ryklova was brought to Ireland on a journey of personal discovery and since 2007 she has been living and working there.