Carolyn Quartermaine, Chateau Staircase, 2018
Carolyn Quartermaine presents a series of poetic fragments that document a journey through the artist’s imaginative landscape.
The large-scale images on vellum trace, polaroids, and mixed media pieces, are the layered, beautiful detritus of intensely felt yet fleeting fragile moments and moods – displayed together as if in a 3D collage, offered up as a visual essay on Quartermaine’s memory palace.
“I’m always thinking of the Monet lilies and how, the closer you get, you lose the form and get lost in the brush strokes - the intimacy and scale is very poetic…my images are a contemplation of a fragile moment that’s eternally suspended…brought up close so that it can be examined.
I only have this one chance to trap the fragile beauty of the moment the blur, the seizing, …looser, forever held on the brink of a moment that is about to be lost. Each image is the abstract remains of a moment.”
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Born 1959 in Cheltenham, Carolyn Quartermaine is an Anglo-Swiss artist and photographer based in London, the South of France and Venice. She has exhibited widely and internationally since 1985 and her work is held in many private collections.
Fine art trained at Cheltenham College of Art and with an MA from the Royal College of Art, London; she has also been a visiting lecturer there since the late 80s and was made a visiting Professor. Travelling extensively and working globally since the 80s she has created art works, spaces and interiors from Japan to NY to Paris, and is internationally regarded as an avant garde artist and creator, blurring boundaries between art and design.
She has been featured on over 40 front covers and worked as a contributing editor for leading international magazines and has an extensive bibliography. She was named Designer of the Year at Maison et Objects in Paris.
Her paintings, photography, textiles, and collages explore storytelling, capturing the emotion and uniqueness of a moment in time, creating collections and installations for leading design houses such as Baccarat, Givenchy, Vuitton, Ricard, Hermès and Montblanc, to consultancy and art direction for her international clients. Her career is united by themes of history, literature, nature and philosophy.She has concentrated in the past ten years on museum and gallery exhibitions and installations, working with huge scale cyanotypes, film, collage and photography.
Quartermaine works from nomadic studios in London, France, Venice, Morocco.
Carolyn Quartermaine Revealed
Weston Library Shop
Broad Street,
Oxford.
OX1 3BG
25 October–
16 November
Monday–Saturday
9am–5pm
Sunday 11am–4pm
