Caroline Wayne

Statement
In meticulously beaded sculptures Caroline Wayne pulls from her autobiography to illustrate stories of trauma, sexuality, intimacy, and growth. She uses couture millinery and embellishment techniques to communicate through craftsmanship. Detailed beading and cyclical patterning emphasize the consistent labor in the repetitive motion of hand-sewing, that which mirrors the emotional and psychic labor expended in order to manage the suffering a body can accumulate over time. Whether illustrating symbols of childhood abuse, its resultant patterns of thought and behavior, or the process of healing, her sculptures translate the life experience of a survivor of deep trauma through the lens of glittering beadwork, rendering a dark reality easier to digest for the average consumer. Wayne has shown work at The Salon at The Wing, SOHO, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, and was a 2017/2018 A.I.R. Gallery Fellow. She is a graduate of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Interview with Caroline Wayne

Questions by Andreana Donahue

Hi Caroline. You mentioned that in fourth grade you began “needlepointing in a preppy suburb in Connecticut.” What initially inspired you to start hand-stitching? Do you have any early memories of looking at art?
I was a really privileged kid in terms of the exposure I had to art early on and for the various adults that supported my own creative development along the way. My mother sold exhibition posters for museums in the 70s when she and my dad lived in Paris and then brought a bunch back to the US, so I grew up looking up at a lot of the French Modern Masters on our walls, along with local artists they collected. Since we lived commuting distance from Manhattan she also took me to the city often to see exhibitions and plays, and while not an artist herself, she understood my itchy hands whenever I saw something that inspired me and would provide the resources to explore. Growing up I had women artists nurturing me creatively from as early as I can remember. From a babysitter part-time illustrator who helped me learn to draw to my first after school art teacher, head of a program designed for kids with a little extra creativity who might benefit from more challenging projects. It was with her that I tried a simple embroidery technique with yarn and a plastic canvas and I was hooked. Every summer without school to keep us busy my group of friends would pick some creative obsession to waste away the days. The year before it had been friendship bracelets. This year, as mentioned in the fourth grade, we went to the local needlepoint shop (that our town even had a local needlepoint shop might be the impetus for my previous use of the language “preppy suburb in Connecticut”), bought pre-painted canvases and floss, and we all learned how to embroider on a grid. The next year we were coloring our hair with magic markers and swapping press on nails, but I kept stitching and if I’m not mistaken some of them are back at it now 25 years later and are quite impressive. In high school I had a studio art teacher who made a point to teach us about contemporary women artists in a community where feminism was still a dirty word. Learning about women like Frida Kahlo, Judy Chicago, even Orlan, at that point in my developing life shaped how I’ve come to see my role as an artist and what I ultimately wanted to do with my hands. 

You have a background in both fiber art and millinery. What factors ultimately motivated your decision to pursue fine art instead of fashion?
It took me a Very long time to figure out exactly what to do with the skills that I knew I wanted to be using every day. For the entire eight years I spent dipping in and out of art school two factors remained consistent: the way I made things – obsessive stitching, and the way it felt to make them – exhaustingly painful, always confused. I had to keep taking breaks from school all together because a big semester-long project would drain me so much. It wasn’t until I moved into millinery classes and utilized the same meticulous techniques to make essentially meaningless objects that I felt like I could breathe. I flirted with the idea of starting a hat company. I did trunk shows, shopping parties, trade fairs at the Merchandise Mart, it never took off. I’m grateful for that. During that time I was also working as a sales associate in a boutique, eventually ending up as manager. Learning the retail side of fashion and getting to know the other players at corporate is a pretty good way to find out if you want to spend your career building off a similar structure. I absolutely did not. In that free space of not knowing what came next I was in the process of uncovering my real childhood history in therapy. All the art I had attempted to make in school that had these wild webs of forced logic sourcing from some unidentifiable pain could now be explained by something completely outside of what I had ever tried to put forward. Having the real story made it easier to tell. And suddenly my work could make sense and not hurt me in the process, and maybe even be used to help others. It seemed like the obvious choice. 

How long have you been based in Brooklyn? What attracted you to living and working in this community? 
I moved back to the East Coast in 2016. I’ve been in the same place in Brooklyn since. To say I came here to get away from an unsavory situation in Chicago is not inaccurate but I had already been in the process of implementing a plan move back in due time, only the rushed circumstances landed me in an apartment in Bushwick with little to no preparation or research and I absolutely lucked out. I’m admittedly kind of a shut-in so I don’t get out into the Bushwick art community as much as I should but it’s so easy to reach people when we connect as so many other artists are based here. I knew I needed to be back in New York if I wanted to seriously pursue a career in art. That’s not at all a universal truth, it’s probably pretty damn risky, but perhaps because I grew up under the influence of the specific tone of art in this area it felt like the place where I could fit in. 

Can you tell us about your current studio? How do you stay focused and productive?
My studio is in my apartment and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I have enough space to carve blocks and present studio visits in one area but fit a couch in another room where I can sit for hours and sew on my lap. I would not be this productive in an off-site studio with a regular chair. To be honest it’s hard not to be focused and productive. This is all I want to do. Finding the balance between working too much and actually having a life has been my real challenge. 

How is your study of biology and animal science connected to your understanding of spirituality? What sort of information or source imagery are you seeking out? 
The more I can learn about the natural world the more I recognize my connection to it. And it’s this feeling of connectedness to anything and everything outside of myself that gives me a sense of faith in the natural order of things, which in turn brings me peace. I’ve studied a little biology here and there at universities when I wasn’t in art school and I continue to read what I can on the whole range of the subject. I am constantly sourcing images on patterns found in nature from micro to macro and this probably influences my work the most at its foundational level. 

Are there specific artists or objects that have been particularly influential to your work? 
As a teenager being exposed to the three aforementioned artists - Frida Kahlo, Judy Chicago, and Orlan - was probably the biggest influential marker for the path I would follow as an adult artist. Learning how to tell stories through self-portraiture, that there even exists such a thing as the perspective from a woman’s body, and the overwhelming power of self-exposure and radical vulnerability, were those initially impressed concepts that surfaced naturally in my first attempt at meaningful artmaking when I started studying for a BFA in my early twenties. I was looking at a lot of the women surrealists then and was particularly interested in the intersections of art, object, and garment, like Meret Oppenheim’s sculptures and Elsa Schiaparelli’s collaborations with other artists, including her embroidered work with the House of Lesage. Louise Borgeois and Tracey Emin probably go without saying, Adrian Piper especially for how she writes about the work, and at one point I was very into Vito Acconci when I was experimenting with more interactive projects. I’m always looking at textile and wallpaper patterns from the Arts and Crafts Movement along with anything Wiener Werkstatte. Whenever I reboot to plan a new series of sculptures, I browse through my big books of textile prints and designed objects to get a feel for form and pattern before I start sketching. I try to stay in touch with what’s going on across the fashion world and definitely keep up with the current couture collections mostly to see new techniques in embellishment. I spend way too much time on Instagram watching videos of tambour beading.   

When looking at your work, the physical labor involved in the repetitive act of hand-sewing is obvious. Can you walk us through your process and talk more about its time-intensive nature?
Making a sculpture can be broken down into essentially two processes – building the felt form for the base and then hand sewing the beads to cover it. To build the base I use the exact same technique if I were to make a felt hat from scratch, meaning I want to carve the actual mold (“block”) myself. With extra sharp kitchen knives I carve a glued stack of polystyrene into the form of the prospective sculpture, sand it, coat it in strips of glued paper and polyurethane and let it dry. This takes about three or four days, tops. Then I take a damp piece of felt and steam it while stretching it over the block, sometimes for hours, until all the surfaces are smooth, and secure it tightly with ropes. A couple days of drying then I can untie and pull the felt off the block and I have a hollow felt shell in the form of the sculpture that I can easily sew into and pull a needle through from the inside. If I am including thumb tacks as embellishment, I block with two pieces of felt and stick the tacks under the top layer so that they are embedded in between and won’t come loose. Depending on the design I tend not to draw too much on the felt itself before sewing, but I do have sketches ahead of time that I always adhere to, and I will mark it up with chalk while it’s still on the block to figure out composition. Once I start sewing I mostly draw with the beads themselves. The embellishment portion of the work takes the longest but is easy and meditative. I hand sew each bead or sequin one at a time or tack them down using the couching technique which still amounts to one stitch per bead. One of my average-sized sculptures takes two to three months if I’m sewing full shifts but giving myself a couple days off each week. Because I also do stitching freelance for other milliners I’ve gotten in the habit of keeping timesheets for my own work which sometimes aids me in pricing when I feel afraid to ask for enough money for a particular sculpture. At this point I know exactly how many hours most of these have taken to build. 

Typically in your work, felt forms are meticulously embellished with beads, sequins, faux pearls, and thumb tacks, which lends the objects a seductive luminosity. They are beautiful objects. How is your choice of materials related to the subject matter?
The choice to use embellishment to tell these stories works in a few ways. First, as a process, the act of hand-sewing reflects the constant emotional labor that it takes to live with, grow through, and to share my history of trauma. Instead of stitching with embroidery floss which can be blended more easily to appear seamless, beads remain visible as individual units, each a marker of a single pass of the needle, an expression of labor in time permanently recorded. I use that impression of labor as a backdrop for another primary function of the beadwork and perhaps its most immediate – the apparent beauty that casts a veneer over the underlying darker narrative. In simplest terms my use of embellishment is just sugarcoating. In my personal life I have found that in order to get anyone to listen to my story at all I’ve had to lighten the details significantly, use comforting language, even supplement with humor. To recount the weighty suffering that accompanies sexual trauma with a sense of levity is both an internal coping mechanism and a conditioned response from growing up in an environment that constantly warned me that my feelings would make others uncomfortable, so in order to spare anyone else from hurting I should protect them from what hurts me. It’s the equivalent of telling young girls to keep smiling, repress any difficult emotions, remain peaceful and accommodating. Using these soft sparkling objects to tell my story is not an endorsement of this message, it’s simply a reflection of my learned communication style as a survivor of the kind of insidious emotional abuse not just inflicted by the patriarch of my individual household, but by the misogynistic cultural makeup of the entire community in which I was raised. 

Each piece often depicts a striking amalgamation of narratives pulled from personal memories and dreams. Can you talk about your ongoing interest in symbolism and dreams? 
My interest in using symbols and initially illustrating my story with my own dreamscapes also relates to a learned habit of delivering difficult news through metaphor in order to soften the blow. My subconscious used the same tactic to resurface my memories of abuse into my own waking mind. Before I was ready to experience full flashbacks I would have symbolic nightmares that through simple analysis might suggest the same person, place, event, that a clear memory would show later in my healing process. But I’m also drawn in by what feels like a universal human impulse to use metaphor when telling stories period, especially from this way we communicate with ourselves in dreams. It’s a reminder that maybe our own perception of reality is not sufficient and what, then, can we use to define what’s real? If we’re constantly searching for alternative ways to represent the same truth is it just a problem with communication or with the way that we see? Using symbolism is just like playing with language and finding the best way to convey what’s in front of me. I should also mention that I will pun in any form no matter how corny, even if it’s just an inside joke between me and the beads, so sometimes a symbolic gesture is only there to make me laugh. 

Have you always confronted your traumatic history of sexual abuse with “radical transparency” and vulnerability? How important is the viewer’s experience to you?  
I have always approached my artwork with “radical transparency”, though up until age 31 it was not about sexual abuse, during that time I’m not sure I even knew what it was about. My memories of abuse were repressed until about five years ago, so in complete denial but still suffering immense pain and classic PTSD symptoms all through my twenties I was never at a loss for personal content to drive artmaking, but the source of my anguish was so convoluted I never really found a clear message. Once I uncovered my true history I finally figured out how to speak through the work and I could follow the same objective in making autobiographical art – to self-examine, tell my story, expose my own suffering as a point of connection for others going through the same. I don’t expect everyone who sees one of my sculptures to know exactly what it’s about nor do I assume they’ll always read the press release or backstory. However, most people have their own connection to this kind of content in some form or another, and what I do expect is that anyone who looks at my work will meet it from whatever level they’ve suffered a relatable pain. I imagine someone might just see a beautiful sparkling object that took an exhaustive amount of effort while another might not be able to un-see a child’s vagina, and either response is ok. It’s whatever you can connect to that validates your own personal experiences.

Your imagery ranges from abstract and pattern-based to more intricate and representational. How has your work developed over time and what direction do you anticipate it taking in the future?
As I continue to develop my skills I am definitely moving more and more representational. I’m getting much more comfortable illustrating with beads and doing figure-focused scenes which is great for storytelling. At the same time, I like keeping a balanced collection when I make each series so I’ll probably always have a couple of abstract sculptures in the mix. Plus, I love a good radial pattern and anything that looks like it lives on the sea floor.  

Your recent exhibition Grown Cyclone at A.I.R. Gallery included new totemic sculptures, a book, as well as large-scale wall drawings. Can you talk more about the genesis of these drawings?
The drawings just started as little 9”x12” exercises I would do in the morning to release anxiety. I called them “Daily Calibrates” – a meditative practice wherein drawing a bunch of tiny circles really fast into some kind of fade pattern would create a rhythm that then steadied my breathing and allowed me to gather myself for the day ahead. The drawings all ended up looking so pleasant that I moved onto bigger sheets of paper and started putting them up all over my walls. The rosy glow in my studio and everyone’s happy reception when they walked in became this metaphor for the way I’ve had to grow up with an automatic impulse to continually micro-adjust in order to appear smooth, happy, pleasant on the surface while there’s an ongoing effort to control the chaos within. This was an obvious connection to the beadwork and so when it came time to plan the next show I wanted to create the same glow in the room by covering the walls with a seamless version of that regulated anxious energy.  

How does your writing in this mini-memoir (also titled Grown Cyclone) relate to the drawings and sculptures?
The main focus of Grown Cyclone the exhibition was to talk about adult relationships as influenced by early life trauma. In my ideal imagination the room that I set up with sculptures and Daily Calibrated wallpaper was just there to create an immersive environment in which to sit and read a book of stories that held all the important information. However, in my ideal imagination the mini-book would also have been full sized and the average gallery-goer would be cool with sitting around in an installation and reading for an entire day. As a truncated memoir, though, it still did the job of connecting important patterns to the sculptures in the room, with some specific references jumping out if you looked carefully. As for the writing itself I try to use a similar levity in my voice as echoed through my use of embellishment and symbolism in the sculptures, all for the same reasons discussed earlier. To mirror the artwork in the room I also focused a lot on rhythm, repetition, and an overall cyclical pattern to the language which reinforced what I envision as the “shape of healing” – biologically based, the ultimate foundational guide for each work. 

A.I.R. is dedicated to “an open exchange of ideas and risk–taking by women artists in order to provide support and visibility.” How do you feel your work is in dialogue with the rich history of this space and its feminist co-founders?
I am so very lucky to have gotten my start in the New York art community with A.I.R. I wasn’t sure if I even had the ability to pursue making art when I first moved here and then off of an application was granted a fellowship there which came with my first solo exhibition, career workshops, and meeting a whole group of women ready to support and show up for you, something I had never had before. I am not a member there but three years later it still feels like home. I wouldn’t just classify my work as feminist because I’m a woman making art about my own body and life experience in that body, but also because any time you bring the subject of sexual assault into an open forum, regardless of gender expression, it’s a feminist issue by nature of its opposition to our culture’s patriarchal function to repress, deny, cover up any revelations on rape. A.I.R. was the perfect environment to start sharing my work on this subject knowing I had the full support of the collective and their history of making space for women artists to use our voices where in other corners of the art world we would not yet be heard. 

Can you share some writers - or works of literature - that are meaningful to you?
Zadie Smith is probably one of my favorite writers, and Mary Gaitskill still gets me. There’s a whole string of books related to the pathologizing of women’s bodies that I read in college that still feel foundational for me, namely Foucault’s History of Sexuality series and Nymphomania by Carol Groneman. I was really impacted by the writing in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran-Foer when I first read it without really knowing why. Upon second reading a decade later I realized it was because of how well he narrates a kid coping with trauma. There are a few passages that seem to describe exactly why I was obsessively trying to make art at such a young age and really why my hands have never stopped. And I don’t know if this is old news or not, but everybody should read The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk. 

What are the best exhibitions you’ve seen in recent memory?
The Betty Tompkins show “Does She Ever Shut Up” at PPOW last year floored me. Her use of text is always so powerful and on point, I am forever moved by her work. “The Un-Heroic Act: Representations of Rape in Contemporary Women’s Art in the US” curated by Monika Fabijanska was a hugely important exhibit and the only time I’ve ever cried in a gallery, I’m so glad I got to see it. I took my mom to the Manus X Machina show at the Met right when I moved back to New York at a time when I was trying to figure out whether to pursue writing or art first, needless to say it made my hands itch and I was beading again within a week. Speaking of beads, I just saw Liza Lou’s Kitchen in The Whitney’s current installation of their Craft in Art exhibit and it was obviously unbelievable. I’ll probably go back and visit it again. 

Do you maintain any collections or live with other artists’ work?
Because I work where I live most of my walls are floor-to-ceiling shelves now, covering up what was mostly old plates from biology and anatomy books. I don’t have the privilege of owning anyone else’s art for now, I don’t know where I’d store it, but I have accumulated a lot of big books over the years and that’s where I try to keep in touch with images I can’t fit on a wall or always visit in a museum. There are a ton of contemporary artists especially in New York that I Wish I could collect. But money and space are two limiting factors. 

What are you working on right now? Do you have any upcoming projects, exhibitions, or other news you’d like to share? 
Right now I’m in the early stages of building the next collection. No, I don’t have a place to show it yet, but it’s hard for me to make one-off sculptures without a bigger plan in mind, so I’ve mapped out as many that suit the relevant new concept and I’m currently stitching number two of ten. The series has to do with surveillance, home videos, the use of the camera as a predatory weapon, and being forced to see myself through my abusers eyes which ultimately relates to one aspect of the female experience - an internalized misogyny learned from coming up in a culture where we are constantly facing our own image through the male gaze. It’s about an 18-month build so there won’t be news on this group for a while, but this is the content that’s ultimately coming. In the meantime I have a sculpture in the group show “Craft in Contemporary Art” at Site:Brooklyn curated by Samantha De Tillio, opening March 20, and am in the process of finalizing more spring/summer group shows and residency plans. 

Thanks so much for talking with us!

To find out more about Caroline and her work, check out her website.