Caroline Elliott United Kingdom

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I am an artist working with painting and photography. My focus is to explore patterns emerging through movement, repetition, and chance. In photography I am exploring these processes in the natural world, and with painting in the symbolic world. Both relate to human experience and emotion. My paintings and photographs are related areas of work underpinned by similar ideas.

My photographs of trees, woodland, and other natural features, are taken at night, and show restlessness, movement and flux. They are lit either by street lights, or moving artificial lights, under a long exposure time. I welcome the role of chance, accidents and imperfection. I am interested in the sense of disorientation, strangeness, beauty and pathos, created by the wind moving branches, or by lights moving as the photograph takes place.

Through both painting and photography, I am exploring natural processes, including movement, chance, repetition and methods of organization.

Movement and change: The philosophy of Heraclitus has been summarized as “everything is in a state of coming into being, and dissolving into nothingness. The only absolutes are strife, motion and change”* . The idea that matter is constantly changing through destruction, disruption, rebuilding, renewal, accumulation, and that every state is only temporary, and transient, is an important idea underpinning my work. My paintings are composed of many layers built up over time, each one changing the layers below, while earlier layers are often visible, but partially obscured. My photographs often show restlessness, movement in nature.

Chance: I welcome the role of chance, accidents and imperfection in my paintings and photographs. Generally my work is not specifically planned or composed, but it evolves and happens in ways which I could not foresee. I am interested in the long tradition of artists using chance, and allowing imperfection in their work, including the 19th century blot paintings of Alexander Cozens, Fluxus, John Cage, automatic drawing, the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, and others. It is also interesting that accidents occur by chance in nature too, such as in the corruption of DNA.

Repetition: Repetition is fundamental to the natural world. We see repetition in our daily routines, life cycles, circadian rhythms. Repeated forms are found everywhere in nature, such as cells, seeds, stones, leaves, molecules, or particles which occur billions of times over. Repetition is also found in the inner world of thoughts, memories, and ideas. These ideas underpin my fascination with repeated forms.

Methods of organization: Patterns and methods of organization are found throughout the natural world, and in the societies into which humans, animals and plants form themselves. I aim to find patterns, and a sense of logic, where a confusing mass or jumble of forms might at first make this seem impossible. Through the identification of a sense of organization, meaning can emerge.