About the Artist
Caroline McKay is an Australian artist who lives near the small town of Federal in the Byron Shire hinterland of northern New South Wales
Caroline travels extensively in Australia and overseas and makes artworks that reflect her love of exploring, discovering and living close to nature.
She is an artist who uses elements of etching, aquatint, drawing, painting, relief printing, sewing, found objects , screen printing and much more to create unique collages and editioned artworks that celebrate the small things that make up life and make life more enjoyable, in particular seasonal shifts and the special value of everyday experience.
Caroline’s work is informed by the patterns of nature that are formed by the action of wind, fire, air water, time, and human intervention. She is interested in the way nature erodes, explodes, decays, degrades, than re-forms and re-patterns itself in response to these forces. Because she lives in an area rich in natural diversity, she is drawn towards issues that affect the environment around her and makes art to address these issues by exploring in detail fragments from that environment and her life within it
Another area of interest is the way in which women throughout history have adapted to their environment, and how they find creative expression in the often structured and patriarchal societies that have restricted them. Her work often includes an element of “traditional women’s work” in the use of stitchery, embroidery and other needlecraft arts, in an effort to celebrate this aspect of women’s creativity. In many works she uses stitchery to represent a physical or metaphorical journey around a landscape to create unique collaged pieces of art.