An Exhibition of Works on Paper 'Arcadia' by Carolyn Quartermaine

"My images," Carolyn explains, "are a contemplation of a 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, the blur, the seizing, the loosening... forever held on the brink of a moment that is about to be lost. Each image is the abstract remains of that moment. I find the intimacy and scale very poetic. I alway want to capture emotion, tenderness, fragility, and intimacy. I want to suspend time. 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.”

Although Carolyn Quartermaine sees herself foremost as a painter, her work as a photographer, fabric designer, art director, collagist, stylist, the list goes on, creates a rare and beautiful visual world. Everything I’ve seen that she’s been involved in, has been exquisite, poetic. For Arcadia I asked her to recreate elements within her artist’s studio upstairs at Connolly; a uniquely personal backdrop for her new works on paper, offering both an immersive moment and an insight into the creative mind. It's very beautiful and like nothing we have shown before.

Carolyn explains that her show Arcadia, is a dream; a longing for a place, like a still from a film where there is an underlying sense of mystery, with narrative and movement. These new works are a blend of classical Palladian landscapes blurred with water, with the English landscape remaining the strongest element… the perfection of Capability Brown and that longing. There is water, it can be the sea, the lakes, the rain. These poetic fragments come from forty years of long voyages in France and England, where the film has been exposed over and over; they document a journey through the artist's imaginative landscape. Her choice of material, especially vellum trace, brings the print closer to a painting, while the transparency allows her to collage and layer like early glass plate photography, with its mysterious, dreamlike qualities, intense yet fleeting moments and moods.

Quartermaine comes from a fine art background and studied painting and sculpture at art college, later moving on to the fine art area of the textile department at the prestigious Royal College of Art in London, where her love of collage first developed. And although she would never describe herself formally as a photographer, her pictures are essentially photographic in their quiet intimacy and captured moments in time. The most important ‘tool’ that influences her entire spectrum of work, and the thing that unites them all is, simply, her eye. She constantly has to edit, she states, it's the same with painting or creating a set, or doing a collage, it makes it more of a journey.

Born in Cheltenham to English Swiss parents, Carolyn is 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 New York 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.

- Isabel