My name is
Victoria Mackender.

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Working with painting and expanded media, my work exists at the intersection of vulnerability, grief, and memory. Through these practices, I seek to revisit frozen moments, unearthing what was lost in order to see it anew and to reclaim it. In the studio, I use materials that invoke sensations of blur or fog, looking to instability as both method and meaning. Organza, transparent oil paint, glycerin, and wax behave like time itself: changing, drifting, eroding, or resisting permanence.

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I explore nostalgia, grief, and death as access points capable of collapsing linear chronology and exposing the fluidity of the self. Paintings and bodies become liminal in their own right. I approach them as vessels that hold overlapping temporalities, memory, and the residues of time. Echoes of fragmentation and spectral presence. They behave like archives of time, holding both what persists and what slips away.

Within my practice, I consider how the body becomes interdimensional, caught between past and present and inhabiting multiple realities at once. This process is both personal and mythic like a spiritual excavation where gestures and repeated forms become a throughline, weaving fractured narratives into something more cohesive and honest. My paintings hope to function as vessels and archives that hold memory. In the studio, I ask how a painting behaves when it is pulled between becoming and unbecoming, and what it means for a body or an image to exist in time.