Baltic Trip
- Lucy Archer
- Nov 5, 2016
- 1 min read
Caroline Achaintre
Achaintre’s works on paper, textiles and ceramics are heady mix of colour, form and expressionism. Drawing from a wide range of sources including Primitivism and German Expressionism, the exoticism of carnival and the playfulness of pop, her works also make reference to contemporary subcultural genres such as sci-fi, the heavy metal scene, cartoons and horror films. Candy coloured watercolours, densely tufted woollen threads and seductive glossy glazes have all become part of her highly distinctive visual language. Her delicate works in ink and watercolour on paper oscillate between the figurative and the abstract, recalling Rorschach psychological test. Achaintre describes her work as occupying an ‘uncomfortable middle ground’ somewhere ‘in-between’. Her richly coloured wall based textiles embody characters or beings with anthropomorphic qualities. Choosing wool because of its associations with domesticity and also for its ability to attract and repel, the artist began making these works as a way of translating the intensity of her drawings into physical space. The length, texture and colour of the thread takes on the qualities of an expressionist painting and also evokes a sense of eerie familiarity associated with Sigmund Freud’s notion of the uncanny. I enjoy the sub-culture references in Achaintre’s work. Her methods and media certainly differ from my own, however the basic ideas that she has, the interest in the figurative and the abstraction of them is something I am also very interested in, making the normal appear abnormal.
