Veronica Kent's practice incorporates painting, photography, installation and collage to explore narratives and portraits of imaginary characters engaged in moments of wonder and intimacy. With a particular focus on mythologies of connection and love, she is interested in how these abstract ideas might be expressed and filtered through a lens of feminine desire. Her practice incorporates extensive research into myriad periods of art history and visual culture, and a recurring theme is the visual representation of invisible - or non-physical - forces such as psychic connection. Through her rendering of the known as unfamiliar by the use of imaginary characters and invented scenarios, Kent asserts Freud's notion of the uncanny; something that is strangely familiar, rather than simply mysterious.
Alongside her solo practice, Kent is one half of the artist duo The Telepathy Project (with Sean Peoples), which critically explores the possibilities of telepathy and other alternate forms of communication. The Telepathy Project's artwork actively engages telepathic practice as a methodology and has comprised concerts and operas based on dreams, remote drawing projects, dream sleepovers, telepathically curated exhibitions and collaborative paintings driven by telepathic communication.
Veronica Kent’s new show makes for a quiet revelation. Made following a residency in Italy and named after Ovid's The Erotic Poems, these works are both layered and opulent, using appropriated fashion photographs, paintings, mirrors and tapestry to fashion a complex and seductive series of picture planes and perspectives in each framed image… impish portrait paintings, designer interiors and further mirrored visages form unlikely, deconstructed and reconfigured tableaux.
Dan Rule, The Age, March 2016