Personal Statement: Carole Griffiths

“Found domestic objects are a starting point for all my work. I remake and rearrange inanimate objects to create symbolic references and metaphors of how we relate to one and another . The sculptures represent the life cycle of relationship’s, our desires, the need for physical and emotional attachment and inevitably the realities of disconnections between people.” 

Carole’s work offers a poetic reflection upon both the process and content of her making, allowing  the viewer  to observe and encounter surreal, and complex relationship between objects, subjects and language. Her subject is the self, as being mother, artist, nurturer. She  extracts experiences through the remaking of  functioning objects in order to reveal the poetic chaos of domesticity . The objects are present in daily life and are reformed and portrayed through drawings, sculpture and words . The works can exist as couplings, of splittings and reconfigurations.  Carole’s  work identifies with the intensity of human intimacy by exploring the incongruous juxtapositions of both the spaces of making and the space of exhibition.

Nuances of everyday experience are uncovered through revisiting and exploring social spaces such as the kitchen. The repositioning and remaking of its contents can become a place of memory and contemplation. The kitchen is a space which can be ‘homely’ and where memories, observations and questions relate to both the making process and the familiarity of the everyday object, and result in a new material expressions of body, self and form.  These components then become a catalyst for harmonious, struggling, symmetrical, opposing, relationships. For example the hook and eye could be seen as hooked up and secure, however once connected there is a struggle to pull them apart, the tension is as visible as the connection. The knife, fork and occasionally the spoon are a battle of war. The salt and pepper sit beside each other presenting a gendered pairing.  The dolly peg can be split but still sits in line, and the whisk becomes a self-portrait of bodily acts.  Materials are selected for their malleability and physicality, and include clay to suggest formed body parts, shellac to create a skin and the rearrangement of the readymade to demonstrate dysfunction.

The various bodies of  work present an open dialogue of displacement between the maker, the consumer, object and its uses. This combination is informed by, and contributes to,  autobiographical accounts of Carole’s domestic experiences and narratives and reflective accounts of making. The sculptures based on kitchen utensils create a symbolic presentation of the pleasures of making and maternity.  However  when such objects are disturbed, by other forms and structures, communications are not always reciprocated and there exists an awkwardness, a split, and an ambiguity that holds resonances of bodily, emotional and psychological experiences that are shared with the viewer.