MA Print

Royal College of Art, 2022-23

Carrie’s MA work involved a particular interest in daydreams, cognitive psychology and shifts in existential dialectics known as oceanic feeling. Her work explored the sensation of self-boundary dissolution and its fusion with external landscapes. She considered how daydreams might be transformed into grand abstract operettas providing an escape for the dreamer into worlds of infinite variety exploding with excess and intensity.

Working also as a theatre designer, Carrie was fluent with 2D and 3D spatial transitions, and the creation of immersive environments for emotional impact. She set herself the challenge in her printmaking to transport the viewer from the immediate world to an immersive and limitless space of imagination and possibility with 2D making outcomes.

Critical inquiries for Carrie’s practice concern the representation of existential feelings and emotions as part of a fine art practice; and their expression using digital mark-making and 2D printing. Symbolism, abstract silhouettes, vivid colours, and cartooning were her choice of tools for conveying transformational identities, enabling complex and emotive scenes to be rendered more engaging. Carrie challenged herself to communicate emotional energy and extreme narrative with pixels of light and a digital mouse.

Carrie’s process began with a photograph of unlikely and un-staged compositions such as a cluttered shoe shelf found backstage or a piece of stage set in construction. The images were scaled up until the original image was unidentifiable with the original existing only as a shadow, providing a guide. The process proceeded to discover a ‘scene’ perhaps like excavating but with a digital mouse rather than a digging tool. Pixels were polished and defined over many days until an entirely novel visual narrative emerged.

Passions like sea creatures that live on the sea bed and implode in sunlight

Digital C-Type Print on Paper, 2023
300cm x 169cm

An exploration of oceanic feeling and the changeable spaces of possibility with inextricable constituents. Mirroring and repetition of source imagery enable new interpretations. Utopic scenes of ecstasy might involve an experience of mystic self-transcendence.