Carole Ann Day - Artist Profile

Carole at Crate

This photo was taken at Cratespace in Margate as part of the Come As You Go exhibition curated by Aine Belton, April 2013. The photographers were Vincci Huang and Holly Skinner, who combined views from Taiwan with images of visitors to the exhibition in Margate.

I make extraordinary objects, incongruous organic forms that explore our relationship with the natural world and how we experience it, experiments that challenge our response to gravity, weight, fragility, ephemerality and the forms of nature.

I work with a range of materials to create sculptural pieces and installations. I am inspired by the forms of the natural world and use materials such as stones, ivy, flowers and twigs to create my work. I also use plaster, clay, muslin, string and wax and sometimes more unconventional materials: cling film, plastic webbing and toilet tissue paper.

I am particularly interested in the concepts of change and decay. As many of my pieces are made from natural materials, such as vegetation, they degenerate over time, changing their nature and metamorphosing into a different state. The leaves of the ivy wither, brown and curl, but in this process reveal another aspect of their substance and suggest the passage of time.

My practice is experimental and intuitive; my pieces evolve as a relationship between myself and my materials. As I work I learn from the particular qualities of those materials, which changes the course of the outcomes I produce.

There is a strong element of craft in my work; I use the techniques of weaving, twisting, winding and wrapping my materials to create different textural effects. As I weave with my material I am making hundreds of small decisions: how tight the tension with which I pull the thread, in which direction I manipulate it, to wind or wrap, to twist or fold, how much to vary the thickness to create texture in the surface of the form. The form evolves; a result of hand, eye, mind and material. The resulting object holds a thousand memories of learning how to make it.

There are two strands in my practice; as well as my studio work I have also worked on number of community art projects, inviting members of the public to participate in a community making event. Most recently I have run two workshops where people have made a Stefani, a Greek flower garland made at Maytime to welcome the spring and invite new love into their lives. As the participants wove their Stefani I recorded their voices and invited them to weave messages into their garlands. We displayed the Stefani to create an evolving communal art exhibition and the workshop itself explored the experience and significance of communal making.