Coralys Carter

Lives and works in Chattanooga, TN and Los Angeles, CA

Artist statement

Existing between memory and make-believe, my work is a confabulatory practice and meditation on my ancestral convergences, domestic spaces, and labor. I wonder how objects and tools of craft both shape and absorb our experiences of place. In using myriad material modalities from textile techniques, glass and ceramics casting and printmaking to assemblage and handbuilding–I aim to discern where memory and trauma live, examine material functions and histories, and explore alternative taxonomies and topographies of the bodymind. I make “memoryscapes” in which I assemble various material studies into sites or scenes. I’ve been working with Toni Morrison’s essay “The Site of Memory” in order to make sculptures that stitch together fact and truth. My material-based process/ing coexists with a research practice focused on literature, critical race theory, myth, craft, poetry, history, religion, and family lore. In my recent work, a life in southern Illinois and southwest Virginia is returned to by the creation of a slippage in time: memory is refashioned through the materials that make a house (plaster, wood, glass, foam, paper, metal, concrete) and the objects that construct our memories (photographs, hair, letters). I consider time a perpetual point of access within our bodies. This co-creation through the present body and the past self folds time, rendering it as physical as the people that slipped through the Midwest via labor, the Great Migration, and the circumstances that...

Artwork