Image: Carolyn Corletto, Sampler, 2020, wood, acrylic paint, plant materials, 20 x 20 x 2cm image courtesy of the artist
January 11 - February 21, 2021
Opening event:
Friday, January 22, 5:30-7:30pm
Artist talk and Fringissage:
Sunday, February 21, 1pm-3pm
The Mill’s 2021 Exhibition Space program opens with Random Acts of Obsession: The Artist as the Collector, a new body of work by multidisciplinary artist Carolyn Corletto. Working with found materials, paint, clay, thread and words, Carolyn has created a personal Wunderkammer. Following her compulsion to obsessively collect, she uses discarded domestic objects and ephemeral natural objects as sites for material investigation. The objects of her collections are often found while walking through public space and parklands, then taken back to the studio to be reimagined, investigated, and imbued with memories. Carolyn’s process speaks to the affinity that she holds with her collection, as material objects but also repositories of identity and memory, ‘I respond to the call of things’ she says.
Artist statement:
I often find myself inhabiting the liminal space between passion and obsession, where collection becomes compulsion. Discarded objects begin to speak to me of a new accumulative value. Motives for collecting or over-collecting vary and combine differently for each collector. For me the selection of an object worthy of collection is rooted in memory and biography. The fixation becomes physical with the need to hunt, to store (sometimes display) and inevitably (for me) the need to make something. My art practice is an emotional response to my experience of the landscape and the materiality of the objects I collect as I move through it. I usually find myself focussing on the smallest objects, appreciating their unique properties and design. In my mind anything can become something else through the ministrations of conceptual meditation. Connections are made between found objects and material processes as they assert their status as saved, rehabilitated or collected.
In this exhibition I have created works that are inextricable from the process itself. Expanding on my finalist work in the Parklands Art Prize I have continued my daily walk through the Parklands and other green spaces, collecting tiny specimens of natural materials or domestic debris and making a one inch wheel thrown ceramic vessel for each object. As the vessels contain my daily thoughts I have found the clay responding differently each day into a myriad of iterations. During Covid restrictions when obsession with making was able to take hold undistracted or tempered by reason I came to appreciate the sense of control these occupations afforded in times of uncertainty, the curative effect before the compulsion returns.
This exhibition embodies a response to my wanderings, my research and the interior landscape of my personal obsessions, all the while mining childhood memories of lying on the grass gazing through the tracery of trees. With deliberate energy each work offers an acutely focussed encounter and collaboration with an environment balanced between vulnerability and resilience. By bringing materials out of their habitat and into the gallery, recontextualising with a mindful counter of tension and tenderness, I confirm that my eyes are open to the urgency of fragility.
Artist biography:
Carolyn Corletto is an emerging multidisciplinary artist working in the fields of painting, sculpture, textiles, ceramics and assemblage. Using found materials, paint, clay, thread and words she contemplates and prospects the materiality of discarded domestic objects and ephemoral natural objects as repositories of identity and memory. Since graduating with Honours from Adelaide Central School of Art she has been actively exhibiting both in South Australia and interstate including being selected by Guildhouse to exhibit her Honours work in a solo show.
The last 3 years have been highly productive for Corletto. She was a finalist in the Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize, the Broken Hill Outback Art Prize and the Parklands Art Prize and was awarded the Wilson Wine Label Commission through the Helpmann Academy. This year she was a finalist in both the Don Dunstan Award and the Adelaide City Incubator Award during the 2020 SALA Festival. Corletto is currently working out of Collective Haunt Studios and has recently been awarded a Diderot Scholarship towards a residency in France that will be taken up after the lifting of travel restrictions.
