A Myriad of Marks

Urban spaces and ephemera  provide an important creative impetus to Carlin´s work. The light of an autumn afternoon reflected in a broken window pane, or the swirling coils of a barbed wire fence, or the traces of an overflow pipe like pigment on a wall, all are snapshot by her mind and filtered through her alchemical imagination and the poetics of her ceaseless gesture making to convey their essence. She wonders at the serendipity of man-marks. She then takes these very personal mementoes and recollects them in a Wordsworthian tranquility. The emotional response to oftentimes random juxtapositions in these found compositions is paramount to the process of her art production, indeed it drives the very movement and intensity of her brush.

In her work she seeks to understand how things around her exist and why they exist in the way that they do. These thoughts very often drive her imagination to search for the perfect visual language to convey it. In examining the relationship between the metaphysical world and the phenomenal, her work is fundamentally the affirmation of the transcendental possibilities of the transient. It rejoices in the beauty of impermanence. It does not mourn that we can never step in the same Heraclitean stream twice but rather revels in it. Every brush stroke, every mark on canvas is a moment to rejoice in because it will never be made in the same way again. She challenges herself every day to search for new combinations of meanings and create new relationships. This fills her with hope because her art is the art of possibility. 

Abstraction, whether Carlin conveys it through photography or in painting, is the only language she feels is appropriate to convey what she sees and what she feels when she sees. She divines the abstract in everything around her: colour, form, poetry, where others would see only noise. She discovers beauty and then through her process unveils it, bears witness to it. Her work is the apotheosis of the mundane. This show attempts to showcase not just the powerful results of this process, in terms of her awe-inspiring canvases, but also the very beauty of the process itself.