Caroline McCarthy

Crisps, toilet-paper, plastic bags, supermarket packaging, rubbish and furniture are some of the raw materials used by Caroline McCarthy in considering notions of value and taste inherent in the surface of everyday objects, images and modes of display.

Positioned in response to a culture of mass production, where every kind of experience, fantasy or sense of one’s place in the world is pre-determined through some form of packaging, the work employs humour and other strategies of intervention to investigate the space between ideological facade and the concrete materiality of things.

The processes involved, of re-working and re-presentation, are driven by a desire to temporarily take ownership of this borrowed material, instead of being owned by it; to create a space where one can poke at the aesthetic codes, while at the same time utilising those codes to arrive at a new proposition, which makes another, perhaps absurd or contradictory, kind of sense.

Caroline McCarthy was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1971. She studied at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, 1989 – 1994 and is based in London since completing an MA Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London in 1998.

Past awards include the Allied Irish Bank artist award in 2001; Open Award at EV+A 1996 and 2001; and a Multi-Annual Bursary award from the Arts Council of Ireland, 2007/2008, with works included in the collection of Irish Museum of Modern Art, Allied Irish Bank, Arts Council of Ireland, Zabludowicz Collection and many private collections.

Solo exhibitions include One End To The Other, various venues, Norwich, UK (2013), Made to Measure, Parker's Box Gallery, New York, USA (2011), Arrangements, Green On Red Gallery, Dublin, Ireland, Light For Cicely, CSI, King's College London, UK (2010), Hoet Bekaert Gallery, Ghent (2008); Gimpel Fils Gallery, London (2008); Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer, Düsseldorf (2007); Parker’s Box Gallery, New York (2006); and most recently a permanent installation for the Cicely Saunders Institute, commissioned by King’s College London in association with the Contemporary Art Society (2010).

Recent group exhibitions include Group Coordination, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2014), Of and For, CASS, London Metropolitan University, London (2014), Vexed Endings, Green On Red Gallery, Dublin (2013).Red Gallery, Dublin (2013).