Profile

Textiles are at the core of Caroline’s practice, providing the means and materials to process and articulate ideas, but often also acting as the reference point in relation to content. The historical, social and cultural associations of textiles, their significance in relation to touch and their ability to trigger memory become central to ideas.  Imprinting, erasing and reworking, stitching, folding and unfolding become defining characteristics, whilst recent explorations have also resulted in works which integrate textiles with other media such as porcelain.

Examples of Caroline’s work can be seen in various public collections including those of the Victoria and Albert Museum; London, Whitworth Art Gallery; Manchester, Bankfield Museum; Halifax, Crafts Council and the Embroiderers Guild National collection. Caroline’s work has included several site specific commissions and responses to industrial and historic locations such as Standfast and Barracks in Lancaster, Salts Mill, Saltaire as part of Cloth and Memory, and Newark Park in Gloustershire.

Her responses to working with archives, encyclopaedias and museum collections, such as the Whitworth Art Gallery, highlight her interest in the role played by such sites of cultural production in shaping individual and collective identities, memories and value systems: in determining what we choose to preserve, which stories we tell and how we tell them.  Recent work has focussed more on memory, cloth and body relationships.