Caroline Wright

Artist statement

Caroline Wright’s practice is based on conceptual archaeology. Her work includes live performance and visual art that is often site-responsive. She works in mediums as diverse as glass and gold as well as the human body and has made work for cities and rural spaces, for galleries, theatres, churches, on desolate uninhabited islands and for audiences of 100 and of one.

Through taking control of the past, by resurrecting, enacting or undoing, she explores the relationships we each have within the world and our control over histories and narratives. Repetition, loss and the return of something to its constituent parts are evident in Wright’s work, as is the Freudian argument of the return to the inanimate in order to gain control. Objects are taken out of service; events are acted, enacted and reenacted. Transformation takes the artist and the viewer from the ordinary to the extraordinary, using emotional value and reverence as a measure..

Wright’s pieces operate with subtlety, proposing small but significant shifts; performances and installations offer gentle but persistent variation for the artist and audience alike through time. Works make use of the senses, in particular the use of music and the spoken voice, some pieces inclining towards minimal, quiet encounters between the artist and the public, others are more immersive and many pieces reference Michel Foucault’s text Of Other Spaces in which he introduces the concept of the Heterotopia, somewhere that requires alternative social codes for a shared experience.

In 2012 she performed Out of Water in collaboration with Helen Paris and with a new score composed by Jocelyn Pook. Out of Water took place on Holkham Beach, Norfolk for the London 2012 Festival, part of the Cultural Olympiad and was a Live Art Collective East project (www.liveartcollectiveeast.com). She is currently working on a publication to draw together a body of work examining drawing and writing with artists Helen Rousseau, Phyllida Barlow and poet George Szirtes. In late 2012, Wright showed her first film, on tides and fathoms at the artist led space Aid & Abet in Cambridge. Wright has shown work extensively in the UK and beyond and has received several awards including an Artsadmin bursary and she is an Arts Council England East Escalator Artist for visual and live art. Wright is a founder member of AIR (Artist Interaction and Representation) a body of over 16,000 artists.