Carolyn Cardinet: Visual Art Blog

Too cold to work outside and eventually the inside space is no longer large enough. So I move outside but it is so so bitterly cold that I had to lit the fire-pit and kept on bringing so much wood to keep me warm in the last cold cold Melbourne days. Still some cold days ahead! Inside shot Outside shot  

  Playing in the studio during the Artist Residency at Red Dirt Studio. I had brought some copper wire from Australia to use somehow on an art installation. This didn't happened however what eventuated was the occasion to try to work with copper on several sketching projects. To gauge what could marry and what were the possibilities to serve this material well.  Here are some examples that I work on during that time.  

These portraits in a sense interrogate our social landscapes of consumption I have been traveling for a month long everyday  from Bethesda - Friendship Height metro station to Rhode Island stop and then take the bus down to 34th St off Rhode Island avenue twice a day. During these trips I had the occasion to see all kind of characters coming in and out of the bus and being the minority aboard the bus in this area. These rides gave me the opportunity to try something I had wanted to try for a while.  Making portraits out of single-use plastic waste.  So this artist residency at the Red Dirt Studio as well as the plastics found on the streets around the studio was the perfect time and allowed me to do this side project. Like sketches for further enquiry these portraits were done as preliminary drawing studies for further enquiries when I am back home.

A Bugs Hotel for the community children to create. This project will go on living at one of the school grounds to offer shelter to insects in need of a nest and home. For this project we used gleaned plastic materials that we incorporated in each hotel room with found organic material.  The Mount Rainier children had a ball and so did I as they showed an extreme amount of thoughtfulness in their constructions. to view more follow artsmart_eco_workshops on instagram

Installation Collab with Artist Tim McLoraine We are in Washington D.C. at Red Dirt Studios How amazing is this piece Moon Cocoon is getting better and better as we create it It has been a fun and interesting project to use and re-use Millard from Tim's studio that Time used on another project prior to this and am sure again in future projects as we are discovering more and more of its potentiality. That is why I love working with unconventional materials as there is no prescribe used for these items, well lets re-prhrase this there is but that was for the object first purpose and as a discarded object it become now something else and something beautiful and no longer a functional object.

Theses sketch collages were created from fashion magazine pages that were cut  to the shape of the garments created for the fashion parade RENEW RUNWAY   These were incredibly fun to make and are now part of a visual diary in the SKETCHBOOK PROJECT at the BROOKLYN LIBRARY  in New York