CARRIE PHILLIPS-KIESER
CAAF Residency st[art]@Art Central, October – November 2011
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
I create images surrounding ideas of childhood/womanhood/motherhood. My main practice roots itself in the techniques of drawing and printmaking, specifically in copper plate intaglio etchings. From the basis of these techniques, I branch into mixed media, using disposable domestic items, such as egg shells or netting from supermarket vegetables. Many of the concepts within my work originate within the context of the domestic realm as I explore these ideas through an expressionistic lens.
A consistent theme to have emerged within my work is that of the nest; and currently it is the foundation of which I build. The nest is a place of protection, of gathering but can also be tangled and web-like place. I use the iconography of the nest to stand in as the visual motif to the labour intensive and repetitive nature of the domestic realm. Like the mother bird who spends her time collecting and meticulously weaving a protective place to shelter her offspring, so to does the woman. It is her place of comfort and centre of family. The ‘nest’ is fragile and susceptible to destruction and any fraying leads to re-building, re-placing, re-organizing.The domestic duties of “home” parallel those of the home. The processes of printmaking, in turn, parallels the domestic realm of motherhood; they are labour intensive and repetitive. The plate, the matrix, is worked and worked, sometimes to exhaustion and/or and perhaps to obliteration.