At her return, she launched a dual career in Milan, working as an artist and as a designer. She was made head of textiles from 2007-11 of a small luxury firm. Mazzolari’s time as a designer involved a complete immersion into the Italian knitted Jacquard factories, where she worked with industrial machines and a large team of local craft women, this craft still informs the core of her practice today. Her ongoing video and photographic research of women and their moving image portraits, ‘capturing with ethos’, are equally dominant into Mazzolari’s multi-disciplinary practice. Based in London since 2014, Mazzolari works exclusively as an artist, using all textile manipulations, painting, photography, video and performance.
Her ongoing series of contemporary tapestries, the Emotional Fields, are the materialisation of elusive states of mind. A depiction of metaphorical inner landscapes, these were initially inspired by Kurt Lewin’s field theory and Carl Jung’s scripts of the collective unconscious. They have a distinctive grey herringbone stitch exoskeleton that interacts with light, creating changing depths and luminous illusions. All maps are hand-embroidered and hand dyed. Carolina makes these works with the help of ‘Fine Cell Work’, a UK registered charity that employs and rehabilitates prisoners with needlework.