FEMINITY
CAROLINE WALLS
Art can be sometimes rough, unpleasant, filled with rage and aggression. My quest on the other hand is to seek beauty. Beauty as an objective, speaking to the senses, an expression of care and warmth. Fortunately enough, some paintings are like that — soft, bold, beautiful and rich — like these from Caroline Walls.
Her gentle fluid lines and rich, but soft colours. Her ability to reinvent the female form, abstract it, yet leave a visible trace. Highly reductive but still unexpectedly sensual. “I hope to create a visual language that speaks to and of the female experience and the continual search for the meaning and possibilities of personal identity, whilst always posing the question,” Walls says in her statement. “What defines an autonomous and absolute woman when the surface of her body has become her frame, her armour?”
“The process of reduction plays an essential part — subtracting detail and simplifying forms to create highly abstracted artworks that although streamlined still hope to achieve a sense of expression and vitality. It is as much about the lines that I choose to paint as it is about the lines I choose to leave out, with simplification of form being at the core of this,”
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Her inspiration: Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois, Nan Goldin, Barbara Hepworth, Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin
On playlist: Sigur Rós
Best advice given or received: An old boss said to be many years ago when I was working in art direction - 'Don’t live for the weekend, you need to find the joy every day’ . It stuck with me and my take away from that was that I needed to find something I loved doing so much that I didn’t find myself counting down the days of my working week..it took quite a few more years to achieve this but I feel very lucky to have found that thing that makes me tick.
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Not only Caroline Walls artworks, but also her own home are worth to look. Simple house in white, hues of grey and wood. White shelves filled with pottery, vases of all shapes, bowls, useful beautiful objects accompanied by her own artworks. A home of an artist and collector. You can see her home tour here, another one here and an article about her and her drawing workshop here.
‘We hope our home has some character, warmth and a sense of depth – a true expression of what we love and what has meaning to us.’
About Caroline Walls
Caroline Walls (b. 1984) is an Australian artist working across a number of media, including painting, drawing, soft sculpture, and print-making. Walls creates work with a skilled and fluid approach to aesthetics, focusing on the female form as her central subject. She graduated with a First-class Honours degree in Visual Communication and Design from Swinburne University (2006) and recently attended the Victorian College of the Arts where she completed a post-graduate certificate in Visual Arts.
Caroline lives and works in Melbourne, Australia after spending extensive time abroad living in both London and NYC. Walls worked as a designer and art director for fashion and luxury lifestyle brands for 10 years before moving into art-making full-time. Caroline has had 3 solo exhibitions of here work, with the most recent two in 2017 selling out. She looks forward to presenting her fourth solo exhibition in 2018.
"With a foundation in design my artistic practice is grounded in a strong sense of colour play, line and form. I am inspired by everyday human experiences and the fluidity and movement of the human body. These artworks explore the female body and the reduction of its form as a way of heightening its expressive power." - Caroline Walls.
Text above from www.meanwhileinmelbourne.com
Pictures: The Design Files; Meanwhile in Melbourne; Yatzer.
Text: by me
A monochrome black kitchen in bamboo by Ask og Eng.