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

This residency brought together the idea of redesigning clothes of the fast fashion era bringing together my past work in Haute Couture in Paris with my Installation Art practice. these are some of the RE-design I have been working on for the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival RENEW RUNWAY catwalk which took place 8 March 2018 out of a truck and onto a man-made runway. The catwalk was a great success with passer by enjoying the breadth  of attires on show by 5 Re-designers  Sam Woud Filfy Rish Rachel Jessie-Rae Fashion Chelsea Carolyn Cardinet The Ta-Laaa finale grand piece was designed by the Yarra Youth Services Fashion group students and assembled by their educator Jenny the fashionista The evening was M-ced by the brilliant  Tenfingerz These are some of the designs I have been working on for this runway

During my residency this year, I gave a talk with the other artists in residence Britt Salt & Anne Graham at the Australian Tapestry Workshop during my residency Here are some excerpt of the talk delivered 6 March 2018 at ATW: '... At 7 people started to notice my drawings, which led me to think I could become an artist. In primary and secondary school I took art lessons at and out of school, during my youth I was always making things while watching TV religiously on Saturday afternoon with my dad. So at 16 exited I expressed to my father that I wanted to become an artist after all I had been working at it for nearly 10 years, this grand phrase didn’t have the grand positive response I expected. His answer was ‘don’t be ridiculous get a job that will pay you a good wage’ … nowadays I finally do understand what he meant and repeat the same sentence albeit not quite formulated the same way to my children!  I starting with painting, when I was young and brought up with

Le Courrier Australien 12 février 2018 Valentine Sabouraud Environnement / Life Style / Melbourne Great Local Lunch : déjeuner engagé au bord de la Yarra Depuis 19 ans, le Sustainable Living Festival offre une plateforme unique aux initiatives les plus diverses imaginées pour limiter le réchauffement climatique. Dans une ambiance bon enfant, il s'empare de sujets tels que l'agriculture urbaine, la mobilité, l'énergie solaire, le recyclage ou le co-habitat. Il propose aussi, depuis 5 ans, un Grand Déjeuner Local réalisé par un chef à partir de produits fraîchement livrés par les fermiers de la région. Le Courrier Australien y était, en compagnie de 250 invités. Au cœur du festival qui bat son plein, des barrières forment un espace distinct où les tables sont alignées sous de grands parasols blancs. A l'entrée, les invités entrent un par un sous une arche arienne à longues franges réalisée à partir de 689 emballages en plastique par l

As the Waste Gateway is being installed social media notices this surplus Plastic! Yes I know but these single-use plastic fruit and veges packaging are there to remind everyone how ridiculous our consumerism has become with packaging, here and around the world!

Here is the final product on the day The WASTE GATEWAY an archway made of hundreds of single-use punnets What a fabulous event with lots of beautiful fruit and veges donated by Melbournians from their own crop and cooked by amazing chefs to create a more then delicious luncheon for 225 people on the day Happy Days!

I present to you The Waste Gateway made for  The Sustainable Living Festival 2018  Great Local Lunch  Installing the archway The theme of the Sustainable Living Festival this year was about Food Waste and was delighted to be able to participate once again in this festival which is very meaningful to me and I am grateful for the 4th year to be been making temporal sculptural assemblages. For this year I wanted to create a more immersive assemblage that people would respond to. The archway was created thanks to the many of the SLF volunteers, friends and neighbours who kept collecting through summer for this creation hundreds of fruit or vegetable plastic packaging. These single-use transparent punnets were assembled with used white packaging straps gathered. The idea was to thread the punnets onto the plastic straps as skewers and attached to an archway to create the entrance to the Great Local Lunch 2018 arena space at Birrarrung Marr. After a few little adjustment

This summer collecting hundreds of plastic punnets has been on my dial and of others.  All to be used to create the entrance arc for this year Sustainable Living Festival 2018. Thank you to all whom have been gathering large ammounts Sketch thought process Red fruit Punnets                                                                                 sliced Polyethylene

After working with scientist and researchers at RMIT University during my Art & Science residency in Sydney this year I was honoured to be asked to be a speaker for the RMIT symposium on the state of the bay. The Importance of Art & Science Collaboration in this Day & Age By Carolyn Cardinet Thursday 14 Dec 2017 11.30-11.45 RMIT - Port Phillip Bay Symposium ‘What happens when these 2 tribes meet’ was the title of an article written on the matter in 2011 Well first we say hello, then both parties are nervous as one has never met someone else interested in their own passion, in their own field of research but somehow after a few meetings one starts to understand that artists and scientists are very similar. Similar you may not think but similar we are. Both tribes are making/creating/voicing hypothesis in their own field. Hypothesis that may or may not have an answer as yet but never the less an answer will eventually come. I have to say that hypothesi