Carrie-Ann Stein’s practice reworks art historical imagery through digital-physical collage to explore personal inheritance, belonging, and resilience through acts of reconstruction and political introspection.

Stein’s practice investigates how reworking overlooked or lesser-known art historical imagery can become a psychoanalytic strategy for navigating complex personal inheritances, contemporary socio-political instability, and the deeper human need for belonging and acceptance. Drawing from her own lived experience, Stein’s research explores how artistic processes - particularly fragmentation, reconstruction, and re-contextualisation - can serve as tools for processing destabilising emotional histories and building inner resilience.

Her process begins with the design and construction of a digital print, painted by hand using digital brushes and pigments. These carefully built images are then dismantled, collaged, and ultimately transferred onto wooden panels, becoming embedded within layers of wet paint - a material metaphor for memory’s layering and the imprint of experience. Starting from art historical imagery as a kind of ‘solid ground,’ Stein’s works intervene in traditional narratives by disrupting and reassembling familiar visual forms.

These reconfigurations are informed by psychoanalytic concepts such as Winnicott’s holding environment and Bion’s negative capability, positioning the artwork as a site where uncertainty and complexity can be safely held and explored. The work also draws on Hannah Arendt’s writing on ethical responsibility and thinking as resistance, situating introspective image-making as a quietly political act.