I mostly work with screen printing and relief lino cutting because they are accessible techniques that celebrate the quotidian and familiar nature of print.
Each piece has an embedded relationship to production and work, revealing how it is made and building over time.
My installations always have an element of participation, inviting the viewer to interact, contribute and discuss their response to the request.
Photograph courtesy of Nick Cooney
Photograph courtesy of Nick Cooney
Graveyard Shift - Back Lane West
Residency (September 2023)
Exhibition (September 2023)
In 2020 my father died during our first global pandemic, not of covid but alone because of it.
As I dealt with anticipated grief at a lockdown distance, I began to make a daily walk to a wild graveyard on the outskirts of Redruth. I would sit by the sound of the stream and feel connected to my father many miles away in hospital.
As time passed and my father died this pilgrimage became a residency, the church allowed me to be guest artist in the Graveyard for the span of a calendar year.
The walking became a daily practice of kneeling to make a rubbing of a headstone, I dropped to my knees each day and connected to this wild graveyard, I allowed grief to inhabit this time and it became a space for anyone who wanted to stop and talk. The drawings I made record the marks I made as my pencil travelled over the paper in response to shifting aches and pains, the reverse emboss records the weather and the carve of the gravestone. Damp Cornish days, deeper emboss.
Writing circled round these daily drawings, and I began to read Roland Barthes mourning diary (1). I fell into step with him, we inhabited the same relationship to grief and my diary responded to his. He, in 1978, me in 2020 but both in step with the number of days since the death of a parent. He a doted on ‘Mamon’, me a much trickier father. I was trying to find a pattern for grief, not neat stages but a rhythm, a familiarity.
The writing was a raw, unmediated journal as I negotiated grief in pandemic times, missed my absent sons in equal measure and I let my daily life flow into words.
The notebooks sat on a high shelf for months before I could take them down and edit their visceral form into short texts. At Back Lane West these texts sit on the lectern as drawings, hang on the walls, are stitched into sculptures and are spoken in the sounds that fills the space.
Footnotes
1. Roland Barthes was a French Structuralist who used Semiotics to decode signs in everyday culture. His Mourning Diary was gathered from scraps of paper found in his apartment and collated into a book posthumously. These fragments record his thoughts in the year after the death of his mother in 1978.
He is referred to throughout this exhibition as RB.
Photograph courtesy of Nick Cooney
Photograph courtesy of Nick Cooney
Test bed - The Ladder January 2023
Performance - Kresen Kernow 2023
Sound piece - Under/Over Camp Exhibition at Krowji October 2023
Graveyard Shift has had and continues to have many iterations. Each piece can gather collectively or stand alone.
It can be sound, drawing, sculpture or performance.
Graveyard Shift
Graveyard Shift - A short film made by Dan Collier
‘Counter Measure’
Solo exhibition at Stones café, Krowji October - September 2022
A solo exhibition gathering recent work from several projects to find common themes.
Some of the pieces have been shown before, others shown in new formations and some shown for the first time.
The exhibition was accompanied by free give-away 'Counter Measure' postcards which invited participants to write to someone who can influence a cause slose to their hearts.
The exhibition also offered 2 free 'Lower Case' postcard printing workshops.
‘Bite Back'
Exhibited at Fish Factory Penryn with Scary Little Girls - July 2022
4 lino and screen-print posters with accompanying workshop and give away postcards. The postcards invite people to write to someone who can influence a cause close to their hearts.
Designed for the Mayven Festival, which celebrates this riotous period in a woman's life, this piece questions the level of political control that we experience and invites the viewer to 'Bite Back'.
‘What do we want?'
Exhibited at Jupiter Gallery, Newly as part of of 'Common Ground' - Scary Little Girls - February 2023
Also exhibited at Verdant Brewhouse, Penryn as part of GASS Collective - May 2022.
16 lino printed antimacassars and tray cloths attached with cable tie wraps to create a site specific installation.
Inspired by the chance of protest these prints ask us to consider 'What do we want?' 'When do we want it?' 'Now, Now, Now'. This chant feels more at home today with consumption than political change. Coupled with an image of human tenderness this piece asks us to think what we need on a domestic scale.
‘Contactless’
Exhibited at Studio Kind, Braunton in South West Printmakers open - October 2022.
Exhibited at Auction House, Redruth as part of the GASS Collective Showcase - November 2021.
The handkerchiefs that breach the anti-climb spikes at the top of the wall are all handprinted with a lino image or text.
. drawn . carved . printed . washed . ironed out . cut . reassembled . stitched . tied . hung up .
The prints assemble in different formations. The starting point for this series of works was a two metre drawing that was made in Lockdown:1 using the newspaper collected on a weekly shop as the source of images. As a way of both documenting and of making sense of events the prints collage images from different moments.
A man on a Shanghai street using a box as PPE, a nurse during the first wave of the pandemic in Italy, riot police, and a child wearing a virtual headset are intermingled with a more personal narrative. The medical equipment left out for collection after my father died, the crow that stalked my thoughts as I mediated life and death through the virtual instead of being able to sit with him.
The piece articulates our slide into being ‘contactless’ reminding us to ‘stay alert’ and ask questions in these slippery times rather than simply accept the social changes that have followed in the wake of this pandemic.
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'Chaotic Storage' (2020)
Installation of 90 tessellating screen prints hung in response to site.
Sometimes tessellating, sometimes chaotic.
Hand printed wallpaper made using lino cut blocks.
Installed in a domestic setting.
Referring to the method of warehouse storage that is based on computer logic the tessellating screen prints explore our relationship to power as information becomes hidden in algorithms.
The hand-made wallpaper uses the motifs of the screenprint, oily men in grey suits to suggest that ‘For everything that is shown, something is hidden.’
'Liberating Language' (2019)
Installation of prints, home-made objects, participation, and give-away badges.
Plymouth College of Art MA show
https://synesthesia.online/Caroline-Wilkins
Liberating Language is a participatory installation which invites the audience to consider the relationship between power and language. Based on my experience of teaching in an Alternative Provision Academy the piece incorporates poster style prints, home-made lecterns and ledgers and a plinth with a handmade book exploring the relationship between language, power and exclusion.
The audience is invited to write their favourite swear word or alternative to swearing in the ledgers whilst being positioned by the lecterns to consider the content of the book. The book uses a font created from the handwriting of excluded pupils. Mirroring the poster there is a basket of badges for participants to take as a thank you.
'Seven plus or minus Two' (2019)
Installation of buckets, scales and 2 pence coins, participation, and give-away postcards.
Tate Exchange, London with Plymouth College of Art
The Clipper Inn, Plymouth with Plymouth College of Art
Seven charity collection buckets full of 2 pence coins, on analogue scales, each labelled with a different cause.
Participants are instructed to:
‘Take a handful of coins from the bucket of the cause that is least important to you and place it in the one for the cause that is most important’
Participants are invited to describe and share their decision-making process. The weight of coins in the buckets is recorded hourly. There are give-away postcards to take as a thank you.
'Empty but full of Potential 2' (2018)
Installation of 35 lino printed boxes
ChangeMakers: Ways of Protest, Elysium Gallery, Swansea 2020
https://www.elysiumgallery.com/protest-360/index.htm
The Buttermarket, Redruth, 2018
Seven lino prints of a body part, each representing a contemporary version of Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man.
Each box is repeated five times and the 35 boxes are installed in changing formations throughout the day and in response to the site.
Each print is also available as a limited-edition on paper.
'Empty but full of Potential 1' (2018)
Installation of 35 boxes, three tote bags and a pledge sheet.
Project Space 1 at Plymouth College of Art
The 35 boxes from ‘Empty but Full of Potential 2’ installed in response to the gallery space.
Three tote bags (replenished daily) hung on the gallery wall with the invitation to :
‘Take a bag in exchange for signing the pledge sheet to agree to complete the task contained within’
The bag contained a parchment envelope and writing paper with the invitation to ‘write a letter to a person who can influence a cause close to your heart’.
The signatures from the pledge sheet were then used to create a screen print showing them fading out.
'Catch of the Day' pasty project (2018)
Installation of 500 Goyataku prints of pasties hung from market stalls for one day.
The Buttermarket, Redruth, 2018
Made in response to discussions with the bakeries of Redruth and linking to the Ailleurs 2 project at Impact 10 Print Conference this installation records half the number of pasties baked in the town during a single day.
Each bakery donated one pasty and the prints were made using the direct contact method of Goyataku; usually used to record a fishing catch in Japan. Each print was stamped with a unique lino to identify which bakery they came from. As the day progressed the market stalls filled with prints. Three stalls had questions designed to generate the sharing of pasty secrets and stories.
Prints were shown at Impact 10 Print Conference and I made Cornish Pasties using Spanish ingredients for our potluck meal for conference delegates and the local community.
