CAROLINE BARTLETT: A Restless Dynamic
Crafts Study Centre, Farnham, GB
21.09. – 11.12.2021

The Crafts Study Centre presents a solo exhibition ‘Caroline Bartlett: A Restless Dynamic’ bringing together various aspects of Caroline Bartletts’ practice in addressing archives, collections and historic sites as a set of ideas.

Currently showing at the Crafts Study Centre, Falkner Rd in Farnham, Surrey, the exhibition runs from Sep 21, 2021 to Dec 11, Tues to  Sat, 10.00 - 4.00.

Alongside new textile based works, it includes the work 'Stilled' which Caroline Bartlett made as a site-sensitive response to the Spinning Room at Salts Mill for the exhibition 'Cloth and Memory.' Whilst her response to the collection of the Crafts Study Centre started with investigating the work of Lucie Rie, this process was disrupted by the onset of the Covid Pandemic, leading her to reflect on the ‘ecology’ of practice as it shifts between continuity and change, deliberate or otherwise and the indeterminates that destabilise the context of production.

Using ‘Stilled as an example, Lesley Millar, Director of the International Textile Research Centre at UCA and curator of the exhibition, says ‘For over 20 years Caroline Bartlett has, when the opportunity presented itself, created work in response to a particular place- its history, architecture, function. These works some of which are shown here, are not literal illustrations, they go much deeper in materializing her experience of the place.’

‘Caroline’s pieces responding to Rie’s work demonstrate the essence of her overall approach, that of setting up oppositional forces. In this case that of containment alongside a sense of a compressed, fugitive force. When the biologist D’Arcy Thompson described that it is possible to see in the form of the forces that are acting on it or have acted upon it in the past, he could have been looking at Caroline Bartlett’s work – the edges fairly vibrate with the energy caught within and between the pleats.

With all Caroline Bartlett’s works, textures and complex shapes emerge through folding, stitching, creasing and stretching providing the viewer with an experience which is profoundly satisfying and unsettling at the same time. The centre and the edges are in a relational state with their surrounding space, inviting the viewer to return again and again.’

To quote Professor Simon Olding, Director of the Crafts Study Centre, ‘Caroline Bartlett’s remarkable exhibition looks into the heart of the Centre’s collection of work by Lucie Rie and reveals truths about the ceramic narrative that we have not heard before’.

Caroline Bartlett has exhibited extensively in the UK and abroad, undertaken various commissions and has work in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Crafts Council and the Whitworth Art Gallery.

Video: Caroline Bartlett in conversation with Professor Lesley Millar:
https://www.csc.uca.ac.uk/programme/5/1/2021/caroline-bartlett-restless-dynamic

More information about the artist:
www.carolinebartlett.co.uk

Press release:

CRAFTS STUDY CENTRE
University for the Creative Arts
Falkner Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7DS
craftscentre@ucreative.ac.uk
https://www.csc.uca.ac.uk