Caroline Roberts
United States
Biography
Caroline Roberts’s work explores the relationship between people and the natural world, focusing on how landscapes change, the traces we leave, and the narratives we create about places. Inspired by her personal connection to the environment, Roberts addresses climate grief while celebrating the beauty of the world. With a background in chemical engineering, she approaches her creative process systematically, testing materials and questioning how they interact. Using light-sensitive papers and chemicals, Roberts creates camera-less photographs, drawing from early photographic processes like cyanotype and silver nitrate. Her work, often made outdoors, reflects the tension between chaos and control, mirroring humanity’s attempt to control nature. She holds an MFA in Painting and has exhibited her work internationally.
Last Project
Museum of Stones is a personal reflection on memories and the human connection to landscape. The artist was the kind of child whose pockets were always full of stones gathered from liminal spaces like beaches and rivers. When she visits family and friends she still finds herself picking up rocks as talismans of a moment in time. During lockdown she started drawing the rocks, thinking about those memories. Starting from cyanotypes Caroline evolved her process, adding a base of silver gelatin paper for more color, and using a combination of masks and chemistry to make the forms and textures. The results are a balance of chaos and control that create textures mimicking the sedimentation and erosion processes of rocks. Museum of Stones is not a traditional museum but rather a collection of objects with personal significance, linked to places and people, inviting contemplation on how memory makes ordinary places special.
Statement
Roberts’ uses knowledge systems - books, museums, collections - as a basis for understanding our human thirst to know, and control, everything. This need for knowledge gathering and research fascinates her for a couple of reasons. First of all, it is a need that she shares. Her background in chemical engineering causes her to systematically test her materials in a near-obsessive way: ‘What if?’ and ‘Why?’ are questions that sit at the heart of her working practice. Secondly, as many realized in 2020, we, as humans, have only a very tenuous level of control over the world around us. For all our discoveries and technologies our dominion over the natural world is illusory. We can be brought down by a brain-less virus. Roberts’ makes photographs without a camera by using light-sensitive papers and chemicals. She is drawn to the immediacy of these processes, which include variations on some of the earliest photographic discoveries from the nineteenth century - cyanotype and silver nitrate. She brings chemicals together to interact on the surface - some are light sensitive and others interrupt the photographic processes in a physical or reactive way - for example, repelling or attracting, bleaching or developing. She disrupts and pushes the boundaries of her processes, playing scientific documentation against organic exploration as two sides of the same urge to discover and examine the world. Much of Roberts' work is made outdoors so that she can be in the world, observing, collaborating and reacting. The results hold a tension of chaos and control, and she’s see these attempts to gain control over a chaotic process as echoing the way we, as humans, attempt to control the world around us. Her MFA in Painting influences her working process, which is an amalgamation of photography, painting, and printmaking. The finished works range in size from unique prints to room-size installations.
