About

Veronica Rowlands is a visual artist and socially engaged practitioner based in East London, working across textiles, drawing, and large-scale public work.

Her practice explores memory, early experience, and emotional connection, drawing on ideas of play, nostalgia, and the role of sensory processes in shaping adult emotional life. Through her work, she creates visual and participatory experiences that invite reflection, connection, and renewed access to personal memory and joy.

Her practice is informed by sustained research into memory, attachment, and the emotional significance of objects, developed through both academic study and ongoing studio and participatory work. Veronica’s background in surface pattern design and illustration informs her approach to image-making, material, and repetition, alongside an ongoing interest in how visual language and sensory processes can reconnect adults with formative experiences of play, comfort, and identity.

Alongside her participatory and commissioned work, Veronica maintains an independent studio practice, developing visual work through drawing, textiles, and material processes that explore these themes in more intimate and symbolic forms. Her work often incorporates a distinctive illustrative visual language, combining image, pattern, and material to create engaging and accessible visual forms.

In 2021, Veronica received an Arts Council England grant to collaborate with a psychologist and survivors of abuse, producing a series of large-scale works mapping the stages of the narcissistic abuse cycle. These works form part of the Gaslit project and are permanently housed at the Nightingale Psychiatric Hospital in central London, where they are actively used in therapeutic group settings. She has since delivered multiple NHS-related commissions, including work for Creative Health Camden, mural assets for the NHS Time Together app, and solo exhibitions at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust.

Alongside her healthcare work, she develops socially engaged textile and participatory projects centred on memory, transitional objects, and intergenerational storytelling. Her work incorporates sustainable and resourceful making processes, including natural dyeing, reuse of materials, and low-impact textile techniques, encouraging material awareness alongside creative expression. This includes a large-scale intergenerational quilting project developed with students, parents, and carers, translating personal memory into shared visual form.

Her public and organisational commissions include large-scale hoardings, illustrated environments, and participatory projects across housing, regeneration, and workplace settings, including collaborations with Galliard Homes, Clarion Housing, Qualis Group, and Taylor Wimpey. This includes wellbeing-focused projects within organisational contexts, as well as artist-led visual environments for children and shared public spaces, where her work brings together play, storytelling, and design at scale.

Veronica’s role often spans creative direction, facilitation, and project management, leading projects from initial concept through to final outcome. Her work brings together artistic practice and participatory processes to create outcomes that are both meaningful for participants and visually resolved for public and institutional contexts.

She holds a First Class Honours degree in Surface Pattern Design from the University of Wales and an MA in Communication Design / Illustration from Kingston University. Her interdisciplinary background spans textiles, illustration, pattern, and digital media, informing a practice that moves fluidly between intimate symbolic work and large public visual installations.

She is currently focused on expanding her public art and large-scale commission practice across healthcare, civic, and urban environments, and welcomes collaborations that bring thoughtful, human-centred visual work into shared spaces.