Caron Malcolm Art

Always take the scenic route.

Caron Malcolm is a visual artist making work informed by travel, movement and place. She has travelled extensively; driven by a desire to discover and through her career as a live music Tour Manager.

Travel informs and facilitates the creation of her work. Access to different people, places and environments enrich her ideas and every location visited stimulates and cultivates her interest in site specificity and place. She explores not only the peculiarities of a place but also her own position as a visitor as opposed to occupant.

Caron works across a range of media centred around photography as either a starting or end point to her work. Hand-made templates and drawing machines combined with collage, overpainting, reverse glass painting and a range of printing techniques are all methods of inquiry.

Looking and learning

Often working in series, current projects include Going Places which seeks to produce images that simulate the experience of seeing; the human eye interprets the objects of our vision as clear and focussed whilst filtering to a blur peripheral information. This introduces abstraction to the mimetic record with printing methods and overpainting further distancing the image from a mechanical facsimile.

Responding to ‘place’ has been a fruitful approach and this includes the studio of Artist Terry Shave situated at the Spode Works in Stoke and an off-site degree project at The Halls, Wolverhampton.

Shapes observed in the structure of Wolverhampton’s Civic Hall were photographed and gave rise to the Halls Spiro series. The building has seen decades of concerts since 1938 andCaron captures that energy in her work. In this process driven series, the energy transfers from the fabric of the building to paper layer by layer. A giant, handmade spirograph is the tool used to suggest movement within the shape shifting forms.

The Floating Beds series is an ongoing collection of photographs taken from the many homogenous hotel rooms that give rise to the transient nomadic life on the road. The view is always looking out to the world beyond, be it metropolis or car park, with the bed captured in the window reflection floating over the scene. This series was initiated by an experience where the call of the exciting looking city at night competed with the safety and comfort of staying in the hotel room. The dilemma is resolved by creating a montage of the two spaces on one picture plane.

Movers and shakers

Her art history interest is largely in the 20^th Century with multidisciplinary artists such as László Moholy-Nagy, Joseph Albers, Natalia Goncharova, El Lissitzky, Bridget Riley, Tess Jaray and Eduardo Paolozzi being of particular interest.

Experiencing and taking part in the UK music scene has informed Caron’s interest in the rich popular culture of the 20^th Century.