Caroline was born in 1962 in Calgary, Alberta. Growing up she spent an inordinate amount of time drawing, making all manner of “things”, and rearranging spaces.

“Even as a child I was fascinated by composition, by the effect of various combinations of lines and shapes and colours in a given volume of space. I loved creating spaces. When I was young I spent hours in my room ‘redecorating’, moving things around, placing my possessions and furniture in different groupings and arrangements. When I got a little older I started rearranging the whole house. Fortunately no one seemed to mind.”

This obsession with visual composition and order did not translate into a career in three-dimensional design but into the two-dimensional surfaces Caroline creates which employ a tremendous variety of media from crayon on newsprint to oil on linen, and which range in size from the grandeur of 8-foot by 12-foot symbolic narrative to the intimacy of eight-inch-square abstraction.

Caroline completed her undergraduate work in stages starting at the Mount Royal College in Calgary. In 1987 she moved to Victoria, B.C. with the intention of obtaining a degree in Biology. “I never considered artmaking as a serious profession until I took an evening art class in Camosun College as an elective. I switched programs the following semester and the rest, as they say, is ‘her’story.”

Completing the program at Camosun with a major in painting, she moved on to the University of Victoria, studying with Robert Youds and Linda Gammon among other well-respected artists on faculty, and graduated with distinction in 1994. At that time, Caroline was deeply involved in an investigation of an expressive, painterly figurative style, using personal autobiographical narrative as content. These small (2’ × 3’) paintings dealt with notions of identity, power, sexuality and relationship as reflected in images of children. The creation of this body of work led to her first solo exhibition in 1996 at Xchanges Gallery in Victoria.

After working and painting for several years, Caroline was offered a full teaching scholarship to attend the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Saskatchewan. “My intention in the beginning of grad school was to continue with my familiar style and concept, perhaps in a more objective and less autobiographical vein. The efficacy of this intention, and most of what I thought I knew about painting, immediately fell apart and I found myself spending the first year of my MFA trying to find a new foothold in a medium that suddenly felt foreign to me.”

Her frustration led to a period of intensive research and fascination with history, theories and practices of modernist painting. The work that Caroline is currently undertaking is a result of a melding of all manner of both modern and post-modern philosophical notions and an ongoing obsession with the idea of the “authentic mark/image”, specifically as it relates to automatism. “Ironically, where before I found myself drawn to images of children, I now find myself entranced by the inherent beauty of the marks and images they create, particularly in pre-verbal developmental stages of seemingly primal ‘automatic’ graphic communication.”

This body of work employs a specific process which is generally a spontaneous and open-ended one involving repeated layering, covering, recovering, hiding, reintroducing and embellishing various images and marks using a wide variety of painting and drawing media. Traces and past layers of mark and gesture become fodder and foothold to direct and inform the gaze of the next.

Though abstract in intention, the “surfacing” of symbolic objects and imagery is integral to each piece. There is an edge between the spontaneously occurring geographies of abstraction and the various representations of symbolic imagery that may provide, or provoke, a point of recognition or meaning for the viewer. Much like children’s drawings, these images often function as a kind of subconscious, automatic story-telling.

“Conscious or inexplicable, metaphorical, metaphysical or material, the flickers of inspiration that trigger a piece encompass the whole range of my own experience and the tremendous vulnerability of the human psyche and soma.”

Upon completion of the graduate program at the University of Saskatchewan, Caroline was nominated for the Governor General’s Medal for Excellence in Thesis Work and the Graduate Thesis Award for Fine Arts and Humanities, and subsequently won further recognition in her field as the recipient of the latter award. She is currently living on Hornby Island, British Columbia and teaching highly successful private workshops in Free Expression Painting throughout B.C.