drifting through debris & rain
Featuring Carolyn Sirois
Carolyn Sirois is an interdisciplinary artist from the Boston area, who works with a range of materials – paper, canvas, cement, found text, newspaper, vintage books, twine, ink, acrylic, weathered wood, flashing, radiator covers, dried fruit and plants. Carolyn erases, embeds and reconfigures.
Artist statement:
"I’m an interdisciplinary artist and educator working at the intersection of artifacts, language,
mixed media, and assemblage. My work is a response to ruins and to resiliency we experience both collectively and individually. I investigate how identities are formed and morphed through the cultural and historical moments of our lives. From works on paper, panel, and canvas to cement pieces embedded with text, debris and book pages, or bundles of yellowed newspapers, I consider the texts that shape our knowing. My inquiries into the abstract notions of perception and thinking are grounded in material objects. In our 24/7 life with endless access to news, information, stories of challenge, trauma and resilience, stories of love and connection, how do we process and make meaning?
Working with an aesthetics of ruins—eroded structures, traces and imprints of time, text under erasure—I consider what we hold onto amidst the fragments and complexities of contemporary chaos. I bundle, collage, collect, research, write, erase, excavate, construct, deconstruct and reconstruct in my art practice. I manipulate materials to present sediments of time and sediments of thinking on loss, longing, transformation and renewal."
Carolyn’s art practice and teaching practice inform each other. She is a writing instructor and lecturer at Northeastern University, where she teaches a range of writing courses including Advanced Writing in the Disciplines for Arts, Media & Design. She comes from an academic milieu. Carolyn has been adjunct faculty at the School of Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA at Tufts), Berklee College of Music, and the Boston Architectural College.
She has exhibited widely in New England and her artworks are in private collections in New England, Florida, Washington DC, Ottawa, Bangkok and Rome. Carolyn is a graduate of the School of Museum of Fine Arts and recently received her MFA in Visual Arts from Lesley University College of Art & Design.
