Carolyn Sweeney is an artist and teacher based in Portland, Oregon. She has a BA in Fine Art from Whitman College. After completing her BA she studied textiles at Oregon School of Art and Craft. Her years of volunteer work with a local forest defense group gave her a strong connection to the ecosystems of Oregon. She continues to experiment in the studio with botanical and mineral color, foraged from neighborhood walks and trips to nearby forests and rivers. She teaches classes at Wildcraft Studio School, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and other locations on making mineral watercolors, botanical inks, lake pigments and natural pigment crayons. She also runs a business called Strata Ink selling her handmade art supplies.
My work is a guidebook to everyday abundance, using natural pigments gathered from neighborhood walks and the drainage ditches of highways. These ingredients aren’t just materials. They are studio collaborators. From my favorite Oregon red ochre to the privet berries picked next door, they each bring questions into the studio. I attempt to answer these endless questions on paper.
I have spent years building relationships with these specific materials, learning the languages they are speaking. I look for patterns, like leaves radiating from a stem or cracks forming in drying mud. In this profusion of natural color I look for order, and express it through the use of repeated geometric shapes.
These shapes can be two dimensional, three dimensional or flip flop between the two. I use paper much like I use fabric when sewing. Paper can be flat and or it can be folded into 3 dimensional forms. Sometimes I fold paper into three dimensional models and then draw them as two dimensional images again.
My work is an unfolding puzzle, trying to fit the pieces together without force. I’m deciphering codes of the natural world, using chemistry, geology, geometry, biology, and the clues I find when collaborating with the plants and minerals I gather.
