México
As an artist I’m inspired by the vitality of nature and the potential of women and growing children. Much of my early work features images of women, while more recent work incorporates botanical and climate-related images.
My art is deeply influenced by my multifaceted experience as an immigrant. Yearning for home while seeking a better life away is core to the immigrant experience, which I felt deeply throughout my life, in my relocations from Houston, as a child of a working class family, to New York, and then Mexico, where as an American ex-patriate I was perceived as affluent. Now I’m here in New Orleans, a city whose culture has historically been shaped by immigrants.
I’m very influenced by a sense of place. The culture of New Orleans is a new fascination for me, its music and second line celebrations, and its vernacular architecture, the humble yet beautiful houses of its neighborhoods.
I tend to approach my work without developing a strictly defined concept, which seems confining to me. Instead, I prefer to let the work proceed unplanned, unfolding as it goes, developing from unconscious inspiration into fulfillment.
I love playing with different materials, and this has given me proficiency in a variety of media and skills. Colors in my world may bring unconscious inspiration – often after completing a project I realize a dominating color scheme was influence by the colors in my environment.
Veronica Casares Lee was born in Mexico in 1974, but as a child moved to Texas where she studied art at Houston High School of Performing Arts. In 1995 she went to the Pratt Institute in New York, where she was drawn to the ceramic body as ideal medium to combine form with her love of color.
Starting in 2000, Veronica was a resident artist at Haven Art of Port Washington, NY, which allowed her to refine her ceramic skills and develop her work ethic. In 2008, Veronica and her family moved to Mexico, where she began to play with and explore painting, photography and printmaking. Beginning in 2015, she has divided her time between Mexico and New Orleans.
Veronica’s multimedia work uses images from photographs taken in New York, Mexico and New Orleans. Her work has been featured in print media both in the US and in Mexico.