Valerie’s work was influenced by contemporary Surrealist artist Glenn Brown, who described his work as “having one foot in the grave and not quiet of this world”.

Her paintings are as much about what’s going on beneath the flowers as what’s happening above. Similar to Freud’s analogy of the iceberg, these flowers represent the importance of the subconscious in directing human behaviour. While we are fully aware of what is going on in the conscious mind, we have no idea what is stored in the subconscious.

Most people’s strengths and unique tendencies are not always obvious and the unconscious mind is the primary source of human behaviour.

The subconscious mind contains all sorts of significant and disturbing material which we need to keep submerged because they are too threatening to acknowledge fully.

The most conscious of these traits are those above the water. The characteristics that less conscious are those below water.

Valerie’s paintings are a process of adding, subtracting, layering, obscuring and re-adding which blur the line between representation and abstraction.