photo by Diego Garcia-Olano
photo by Rino Pizzi
photo by Tony Spielberg
I gave birth to my first born at home, in the pandemic, alone. Towards transition, my husband awoke and held my forearms as I braced and moaned. We didn’t know what we were doing, and before we could make the contractions match the formula, I knelt on my hands and knees and pushed her out.
I was a feral warrior woman, and then, a broken leaking vessel. I take them both with me into the studio. There, I can hear myself, and know that I have a self. Drawing the body is visceral and direct. I draw pain and fear, as I face new thresholds of growth. I paint emotion.
I take motherhood towards monumentality. On 12-foot canvas, I have room to make full gestures with space to spare. I bring the emotion and chaos and enduring beauty of living to the party.
How do I take the dark immediacy of my sketchbook into the bright vast canvas? I don’t know what I’m doing, which keeps the process fresh and helps me not to repeat myself. The mystery is vulnerable. I like getting lost, and finding something I didn't know I had.
Motherhood begs for subversion, as it takes everything you have, from every layer of being. In late-stage capitalism, both caretaking and art-making reclaim human purpose and meaning. Nobody supports this. The stakes are actually high.
Caroline Wright dances across her large abstract paintings, bringing music and movement into the visual field. A native Austinite, Caroline received a BA from Brown University, and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
After Brown, Caroline moved to Paris and lived in an abandoned state building in Belleville, with artists from all over the world. This imprinted in her the path of a life made through and for art-making. Wright returned to Austin in 2007 to participate in the art community of her hometown.
Caroline loves encouraging artists to take up space, explore deeply, and make a living with their art.
As a new mother of two, Caroline now considers the revolutionary and subversive potential in caretaking, creating, and talking openly about the mess that makes us.
MY PAST:
After graduating from Brown in 2004 with a double major in Visual Art and Art History, I moved to Paris and fell in with a collective of artists from all over the world, just getting started in a squatted, abandoned state building in Belleville. We tore out walls and carpets of secretarial offices that had been locked since the 80s to make our studios.
Even a squat did not escape France's love affair with bureaucracy. Each weekend there was an interminable réunion on such issues as where the “seat of the administration” should be (the kitchen), cigarette smoke choking the air. But somehow we had running water, electricity, wifi, a chef, a massage therapist, and even a radio station.
We defended our project on a regular basis to the mayor of Paris, while I defended myself as the youngest in the group and the only American. This creative and challenging environment imprinted the possibility of a life by and for art-making. In 2007, I returned to Austin, Texas to participate in the burgeoning art community of my hometown.
In 2010, I made the leap to painting full-time, and providence stepped in to make it so. I split time between my backyard studio and travel for residencies, exploration and study. In 2016, I received a Masters of Fine Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in the inaugural class of the low-residency program led by Gregg Bordowitz. My head exploded on a daily basis, and I came out knowing as ever that I've found a calling I will spend my life exploring without end.
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