The Mill’s 2021 Exhibition Space program opened with Random Acts of Obsession: The Artist as the Collector, a new body of work by multidisciplinary artist Carolyn Corletto. Working with found materials, paint, clay, thread and words, Carolyn has created a personal Wunderkammer.
Image: Courtesy of the artist.
Image: Courtesy of the artist.
Artist statement
I often find myself inhabiting the liminal space between passion and obsession, where collection becomes compulsion. Discarded objects begin to speak to me of a new accumulative value. Motives for collecting or over-collecting vary and combine differently for each collector. For me the selection of an object worthy of collection is rooted in memory and biography. The fixation becomes physical with the need to hunt, to store (sometimes display) and inevitably (for me) the need to make something. My art practice is an emotional response to my experience of the landscape and the materiality of the objects I collect as I move through it. I usually find myself focussing on the smallest objects, appreciating their unique properties and design. In my mind anything can become something else through the ministrations of conceptual meditation. Connections are made between found objects and material processes as they assert their status as saved, rehabilitated or collected.
In this exhibition I have created works that are inextricable from the process itself. Expanding on my finalist work in the Parklands Art Prize I have continued my daily walk through the Parklands and other green spaces, collecting tiny specimens of natural materials or domestic debris and making a one inch wheel thrown ceramic vessel for each object. As the vessels contain my daily thoughts I have found the clay responding differently each day into a myriad of iterations. During Covid restrictions when obsession with making was able to take hold undistracted or tempered by reason I came to appreciate the sense of control these occupations afforded in times of uncertainty, the curative effect before the compulsion returns.
This exhibition embodies a response to my wanderings, my research and the interior landscape of my personal obsessions, all the while mining childhood memories of lying on the grass gazing through the tracery of trees. With deliberate energy each work offers an acutely focussed encounter and collaboration with an environment balanced between vulnerability and resilience. By bringing materials out of their habitat and into the gallery, recontextualising with a mindful counter of tension and tenderness, I confirm that my eyes are open to the urgency of fragility.