caroline kinkead

drawing + ceramic + painting

caroline kinkead


Démarche

Dans un monde valsant entre l'accumulation d'objets et la critique de cet attachement matériel, j'aime réfléchir à la place qu'occupent ces objets qui nous accompagnent et parfois nous possèdent. J'affectionne particulièrement ceux qui échappent au circuit de consommation. Je m'interesse a la notion du passage du temps et de la memoire. Que se passe-t-il lorsque differentes periodes font collision. Comment ces differents moments cohabitent-ils dans notre moment culturel et en nous. Le papier comme espace de representation de l'espace interieur. Un present perpetuellement hante par le passe.

I work with drawing, painting, and ceramics to explore the emotional charge of domestic spaces, objects, and bodies. My practice revolves around the female figure as a shifting presence, not a fixed identity, but something more fluid and symbolic, almost spectral. Through expressive, often automatic mark-making, I attempt to translate fleeting internal images into something tactile, something witnessed.
Much of my visual language is built from fragments: erased silhouettes, borrowed forms, comic book haircuts, family photo album poses. These motifs are reassembled into ambiguous tableaux, part stage, part memory, places where time folds in on itself. I’m interested in how images carry memory, how gestures repeat across generations, how a face can vanish and still speak.
Drawing for me is both intuitive and ritualistic, a way of listening. The repetition of marks, the layering of figures, the erasure and reappearance of forms all become ways of working through presence and absence. At times, the work takes on the rhythm of an incantation: slow, private, charged with something that resists articulation. I don't think of it as narrative work, but there is a thread running through, like a silent, experimental graphic novel built from unspoken memories.

Themes of femininity, domesticity, and quiet resistance run through the work. I’m drawn to the unseen forces that shape us: family myths, invisible labor, inherited silence. In a culture that demands clarity and high-definition visibility, I prefer opacity, not to obscure, but to protect, to allow ambiguity, to hold space.

What emerges is a body of work that is not declarative but intimate, a visual language of suggestion, intuition, and quiet ritual. A kind of drawing that listens as much as it speaks.