I’ve spent a thousand seconds cross examining this info/intro paragraph - Why a site now, what to include, how far back to go and who cares???
Three Short Answers got me started:
1. A very wise new friend pointed out: To maintain your visibility. Bingo!
2. New city, independent life, people ask where they can see my work.
3. Transition: To explore what it means to shift out of institutional attachment to words, meanings and creative practice… To make sure I believe what I’m saying today because that also changes.
And it might be fun?… It can also be casual and changed every day...I’ m not done yet….
PROCESS
INSIDE STORY: Core Culture Closed -in a quietly monitored and controlled four person, family home filled with beautiful artifacts*, and mother’s handwork and design. My sister and I were limited however, in our outside freedoms; limited for our protection and safe guarded for a chance at a successful future . (It worked). Drawing and painting were the exceptions to those restrictions. Like most children, our impulse to mimic and make marks came naturally. To their credit, our parents modeled and nurtured that impulse in largely unspoken ways; by re-envisioning scarcity, re-designing garments/patterns, consciously composing our spaces, building a life with a kind of ragged discipline, and dogged persistence. Terry and I enjoyed permission and encouragement to paint pictures on our bedroom walls. That encouragement continues to feed my appetite for marking on, revising or transforming anything that will sit still for me. That was their legacy and what I see as the privilege of poverty.
* Our father once owned and operated an independent delivery service in Indianapolis (pre-UPS), where a design shop owner’s payment sometimes included handsome decorative objects and antiques.
Carol Ann, 1967, Self Portrait
OUTSIDE Life: Midwestern American cultural dynamics prevailed. In short, I absorbed and assimilated in education, social changes and challenges of the 60’s onward. Later, I benefited from university employment, travel related experience, the limits and freedoms of changing times. Today, with our systems in flux, I see them as simultaneously bursting with potential for both great success and misfortune.
My work reports on the spaces between the poles...to consider the quality of grays between black & white, and to live thoughtfully with our questions; mine is a both-and position.
IN PRACTICE: I make physical and digital objects meant to thematically reflect the connections between memories and narratives, a figure to its ground, a needle to fiber, travel between ideas, cultures, places of the mind, touch relative to healing and repair; and ultimately the intersections of art and life. My work maps and tracks relationships. One thing leads to another and nothing is ever entirely finished. The installation format allows for connections between elements, their extension into the physical spaces they occupy, and to the viewer who encounters them. My digital/video work has evolved over time, incorporating physical materials, introducing project partners, sound, movement, scale and new audiences.
Further, I am compelled to layer things, stacking, wrapping, bundling and burying them. I conceal, stitch, journal, overlay, bag and expose. I see surfaces as skins that reveal the voice or character of a thing’s lived experience-crusts, bruises, aging, scars, rupture, all as visible punctuation marks. I assemble diverse materials with the impulse to bring them back (or forward) into life, linking seemingly opposing subjects or approaches, as a way to explore their possible compatibility.
Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. Rumi
Storage Unit, In Process
BIO
Carol Ann Carter is an interdisciplinary visual artist whose creative work began in painting and intaglio printmaking at the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis, IN. It currently involves mixed media painting and construction, installation, digital imaging, performance, and video.
She earned an M.F.A from The University of Notre Dame in 1974, and a B.F.A from The Herron School of Art of Indiana University in 1970. She has taught at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame IN, Penn State University, The University of Michigan, and from 1996-2015, The University of Kansas Visual Art Department: painting, drawing, design foundations, and graduate studies. Selected exhibits and installations include: 2009 Body/Objeckte, Luebeck, Germany; a 2004 solo video installation at The Burgkloster Kulterforum, in Luebeck, Germany; and 1994, Living Room at The Indianapolis Museum of Art. Awards include a J.W Fulbright International Fellowship to Stockholm, Sweden, a Ford Foundation Fellowship for Minorities, and a Lilly Open Faculty Fellowship to Nigeria. In addition, Carter was the 2008 KU faculty presenter for the Hall Center Humanities Lecture Series. She received two Kansas Art Commission/NEA Individual Master Artist Fellowships, and The Lawrence Cultural Arts Commission Phoenix Award in Interdisciplinary Art.
Carter was affiliated with the G.R N'Namdi Gallery (Chicago, Detroit) from 1989-2012.
Carol Ann Carter is Professor Emeritus, 2016
University of Kansas