Carolyn Craig

Carolyn Craig is an interdisciplinary artist examining how power is articulated within and through the body and language. Her research considers how representational practices are implicit within the construction of class, sexed and racial tropes. Her studio practice archives remnants from performative ‘acts’ or site-specific investigations. This material is then re-contextualised through print processes to destabilize its normative representational value as social collateral and to articulate affect. Her material focus is within copy-based protocols. She is a current director at Frontyard Projects, Sydney and Schmick Projects in Haymarket.

Craig teaches at the National Art School in Sydney where she is Head of Printmaking, and has been a finalist in the Churchie, Freemantle, Burnie, Bangkok Drawing and Print Triennial, as well as many others.

Tell us about your creative process, what drives your practice?

My practice is driven by the need to create a mediating state through which I can comprehend the world and live within its confusion and affectual pain.

Your work navigates concepts of social power and the performative self. How do you define and explore these ideas within your practice?

Social power is the way privilege operates over the body and its systems and relations. This relates to the performative self through what Pierre Bourdieu calls the habitus – the area of embodied space that we each inhabit as social subjects. The more social privilege we have access to – the more agency through which our bodies perform in all facets of the lived state. Having come from a complicated background – I always felt like my allowable lived space was restrictive and controlled. I always felt like each breath was stolen and under threat.

What is the significance of documenting your performances through printmaking and ‘copy-based protocols’?

Documenting performances that engage with that theoretical arena provides a kinestic knowledge that feeds back into my own understanding of subjectivity and gives agency through its artefact as a visual practice. The archive as an act of repetition then goes out into the world to re-inscribe modes of representation in the same social sphere that enacts control. As a youth a certain image was taken of me that I deeply resent existing. In forcing multiple copies of acts of emancipation back into the field of cultural production, I am both overwriting that image and redacting its power.

Do you have any advice to offer to emerging artists and printmakers?

Make work – start ARI’s, curate shows, look at post-grad options and residencies.

Are there any female printmakers | artists that influence you?

I only occasionally look at printmakers as part of my research practice and encourage other print based artist to consume the best contemporary artists rather than just print. …but I have been mentored by some special humans such as Judy Watson and Professor Lynne Allen (Boston University). Both these artists emancipatory use of print to give agency to Othered bodies. Their advice and kindness has been pivotal in sustaining me.

Finally, what exciting projects are you working on at the moment?

My current thinking is centred on generating an arts ecology for the emerging sector. Projects include Schmick Contemporary in Chinatown, an artist run space that supports emerging and experimental material practice and Frontyard Projects , an artist run space in Marrickville that offers residencies and spaces for dialogue and generating cultural critique. I am also heavily invested in our cat George.