Victoria Kortekaas

Victoria Kortekaas is a visual artist who works with a variety of different media and technologies, including photography, textiles, typography, digital art, and desktop publishing. Her previous practice highlights and explores issues surrounding economic and social inequalities in working-class communities. Through her practice, she develops participatory strategies to enable individuals and groups to tell their stories through creative media.

This work has included a series of photos and artist books depicting participants’ responses to societal prejudices around unemployment. Her experience includes working in community arts education and also on participatory arts projects with a range of stakeholders, including Leeds University Libraries Leeds City Council, East Street Arts and other local agencies to create visual outputs exploring identity

Victoria is the co-founder of  The Highrise Project CIC formed in response to the lived experience of living in social housing. Alongside Artist Louise Atkinson she uses her artistic skills and interests to work with marginalised communities to help them tell their own stories through art and digital technology. Victoria is currently studying for an M.A in Creative Practices at Leeds Arts University exploring the objects, place and space. 

Her current work uses digital photography, experimental printmaking, and bookbinding to create artists’ books. Using these digital and traditional processes to examine the relationship between people and the spaces they inhabit, how they interact, and the visible traces they leave behind after they are gone.Victoria aims to capture the people’s engagement with spaces and the way they shape them through acts of ad hoc urbanism, abandoned or lost objects, and thingness. Examining how these interactions impact the everyday rhythms of people, places, and and the visible traces they leave behind. Victoria uses the process of research and making to create outcomes that explore the language of the object and human interaction through the creation of tactile artists books and through this co-production with communities working alongside participants to capture stories and experiences.