CAROLYN CASE - BUBBLING UP AND BOILED DOWN

Carolyn Case uses the painting vocabulary of texture, colour, and space to interrogate what it means to live in a visual world. Here, painting functions as an exploratory method that offers alternative readings to daily rituals, family routines, and the sometimes mundane order of life that gives peace and stability to our everyday living experience. Case’s abstract imagery points towards the sublime but at the same time it references domestic moments taken from the time she spends in the kitchen, specifically doing the dishes and standing above the sink. Case describes: With everyone eating at home, cleaning the kitchen punctuates my day and dirty dishes even bookend my studio time. After meals, I began photographing the sink, when the water was multi-coloured, and bits of spinach and noodles were floating about.

These contained sinks were reminiscent of lily pad-filled ponds, so I connected domestic spaces with imagined romantic water lilies in my paintings. The combination of the kitchen sink and the lily pads became the specific imagery I thought about as I painted. Through a long process of adding and removing thick layers of pigments to rebuild the surface, Case encounters the world's magic in her submerged organic forms. Indeed, the paintings in this show result from constant observation, decision making, building, and erasing. The artist refers to her practice as a deeply intuitive and experimental path, a method of 'call and response' where ideas somehow have to obey the needs of the material and the opportunities that can arise from the paint.