Cara Collins's Projects

BFA Student

Major: Printmaking

Graduation Year: 2018

Artist Statement:

Our most personal environments are a reflection of our mental and spiritual well-being. We perform small rituals in these environments by curating the objects and materials that we surround ourselves with. Through these mediative happenings, we receive affective sensations from the material world outside of ourselves. These prelinguistic interactions we perform with our animal bodies are not unlike the sublime force we feel when we are in the natural world.
An object or simply a material, evoking a kind nature for instance, has enough agency to elicit a cathartic affective response from a body: a prelinguistic spell that gives us goosebumps or alleviates destructive thoughts. When we are truly calm, we react to the subtleties in the material world on a purely bodily level, in the pool of our subconscious before our logical human mind has even received the message.
My recent experiences with the loss of loved ones has directed my attention to the large quantities of material things that we collect and carry with us over a lifetime. The power that our things hold over us, the agency, can be constructive and other times malevolent. The deeper I think about the materialism, the more conflicted I become. Nonetheless, it feeds my processing of the world. When we leave this world, our materials possessions lag behind. Those around us will sort and disperse this assemblage of material entities. This prompted me to seriously reflect on my own materialistic tendencies, primary those that a saw as being detrimental to a peaceful mind.
By recycling the materials to which I have found, been given or must dispose of, I hope to explore this sublimity in my meditative interactions with the rest of the world. These materials, to name a few, include the following: junk mail, cardboard, bones, funerary flowers, rocks, family photos, journal entries, collected paper waste, hair, plastic bags, packing plastic, old t-shirts, and teeth.
I create spaces for meditation and catharsis regarding materiality, transience, death and substance abuse. My work explores the spaces in between: states of becoming, mourning and deep reflection while simultaneously struggling to undermine materialistic tendencies that are not beneficial.