Exhibitions

The sensory experiences of incarceration – such as the visual, auditory and tactile dimensions of prison life – shape the temporal and embodied lives of those both while in prison and after release. By engaging with spaces of confinement via immersive inter-relational sense acts - I produce a counter archive to the normative representations that dominate carceral imagery using symbiotic substances as stand ins for the human body (algae/agar).

This counter archive remains fluid – inter-relational and abject.

The work Baroque Skins holds agar and bacteria in a large modernist shaped Petrie dish swabbed with acidophilous, listening to the sonic residue of a prison cell and the crimes act of 1900. The surface of the agar feels like skin floating – visceral – contaminated and confined within a modernist rhetoric - dissociated from the body in a temporal loop. This temporal loop of industrialised carceral time operates cross all my works – and reflects  on the civic death of imprisonment – the shell that follows you through life as a stain, a punishment a conclusion that closes every forward act before it begins.

Carolyn Craig is an artist whose work examines the coded construction of subjectivity. Her research investigates extractive modes of production and the material relations that perform this at both a quantum and bodily level. Working between a dispersed representational practice and a direct performative mode - she frames her work within modes of echo and diffraction.

Image: Carolyn Craig, Temporal Persistence 3: inter-agentic delusion, 2025, Custom perspex tank, Algae (Tisochrysis Strain), Water, Air Pump, Tube, Performance video on loop with cloud sequence, Projector, USB, Cables, Plywood Plinths. Courtesy of the artist.