Carol Oster

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

As an artist I am interested in the process of collection and selection of material remains gleaned from personal artifacts. I seek agency and reclamation of my lived history through exploration of the vestiges of this found material. Some of these material survivors were of great importance in their time, others had little import but remained. Some material I use as it is found, some I re-bury again this time in plaster, gesso or hidden in the wrapped cloth of another surviving piece The culled materials are selected, and decisions are made with attention to artifacts that will be woven into the work to be intentionally visible and those to remain hidden. Which vestige will stand in as representation of memory amongst the broken pieces of wood that are carefully placed and mended; scaffolding each other, mixing their DNA as they reclaim a renewed space and time. I look to particular materials in an effort to understand the calcified beliefs fed through literature and media. I rearrange and join divergent pieces from the past into a more complete present; reconcile disparate worlds shared; and unearth the remnants of devastation existing side by side with the desire and need for magic and play. For me, a work is complete when it has become a new whole that contains both the material of old, psychic and physical, and a new dimension that has mutated the past and now superseded it by the sum of the parts.

Artwork