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Carolina Mazzolari
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Born in Milan in 1981, Carolina Mazzolari studied at Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti Milano (1999-2001) and at London’s Chelsea College of Art (2000-2003), where she specialised in textiles, dyeing techniques and screen printing. Based in London since 2014, her practice involves textile manipulation, printing, painting, photography, video, and performance.
Her on-going series of tapestries, Emotional Fields, hand-dyed, un-primed linen embroidered in her distinctive grey herringbone stich, resemble abstract woven maps or mandalas and are the materialisation of elusive states of mind, inspired by Kurt Lewin’s space diagrams and Carl Jung’s theories of the collective unconscious.
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Initially inspired by Psychological Field Theory and the desire to create a visual realization of an invisible spiritual state, her emotional topologies appear as mandalas or diagrams, which radiate out from a center, outwards into positive space. The dark regions appear as voids or missing elements of the map; inevitably to be associated with a moment of isolation, of disconnection, or of loss. These ideas are manifested as woven emotional maps, guiding the viewer through abstract states which are described in cotton, silk and wool thread embroidered onto an unprimed linen with her distinctive herringbone stitch technique.
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"My stitch is a simple herringbone pattern, but when made repeatedly onto a large area, it gives a sense of depth and adds a distinct approach."
- Carolina Mazzolari
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Tapestry and embroidery are among the most ancient media - the loom and the kind of frames Carolina Mazzolari is using are the oldest technological instruments alongside the stone axe and the knapped flint.
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Flags Series
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Flag Landscape, 2020
65 x 45 cm
These quiet and eloquent works remind one of pennants running up a halyard on a yacht used to send a message to another vessel, for example during a regatta, to celebrate gathering together on the sea in summer to mess about in boats. Meditation or prayer flags sending wishes to afar worlds.
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They also connect to bunting, the garlands of flags hung outside in the streets during a festival, a parade, a time of happy assembly, which we yearn to return to.
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"While the tapestries and the mixed media works belong in this feminist story, the textile pieces also continue a different strand of the avant-garde, engaging in the struggle to find a way of visualising inner states. Mazzolari’s Emotional Field artefacts, such as “Love”, “Hesitation” and “Matrix” , are the materialisation of elusive states of mind; the figures of "Isis” and "Pan” and “The Great Mother” are textured apparitions — portraits — in this world of otherworldly beings.”
- Marina Warner on the work of Carolina Mazzolari
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"Stain is a renunciation of an area of the fabric. Life is filled on the surface and enclosed onto the structure of cloth, mostly unintentionally. Textiles have a memory as a result they become victim of their own frailty. A fabric does not fail to tresspass any accidental mark."
- Carolina Mazzolari
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Available Works
Carolina Mazzolari : Viewing Room
Current viewing_room
