Caroline Perkison

← Return to Colossal Wait: 2022 Senior Art Exhibition

 

 

I am a Texas-based multimedia artist working primarily in textiles, sculpture, print, and video. I focus on themes of community and isolation, exploring how stories warp over time, are forgotten, or become skewed beyond recognition. Recently, I have been interested in technologies and the climate crisis. My imagery centers around domestic interior spaces, often featuring portals such as windows, doors, hearths, cave-like entryways, and ascending ladders. Knick-knacks, patterns, and miniatures frame these spaces. I take inspiration from histories of queerness and emphasize the celebration of LGBTQ+ identities and communities. I add illustrations and symbols from my own memories growing up queer, highlighting the comfort and joy the queer community has brought me.

I work with an assembly of found objects from anonymous people and from my past. I primarily incorporate found, handmade textile pieces, which I sew into my quilts; I view this as a collaboration with the anonymous artist who created the found piece. I am interested in art forms frequently labeled as “crafts”—methods used primarily by women, and typically displayed in someone’s home or yard for their community. I appreciate the social and collaborative methods of these crafts, especially quilt-making and other fiber arts. I love how these pieces fray and age, how they are stained and mended over time, and how the images continue to change as they wear.

I am inspired by abandoned houses and the silent absence they hold; how time seems to stop in these spaces without people there to change the interiors. The houses weather and decompose, questioning the notions of permanence and the boundary between indoor and outdoor. I am interested in the house as a symbol of the subconscious; as a place that can provide a sense of stability and comfort, but can also stir up feelings of entrapment, emptiness, or loneliness. The house can impose repetitive monotony, yet can also bring about experiences of all-consuming joy.

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