Caroline McAuliffe
Pink Hair
Digital Print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag
2022
Caroline is a fiber artist. She spends her time creating woven wearables and narrative scenes that explore folkloric familial nostalgia. She blends life and art through costume and play. Caroline holds an M.F.A. from Pratt Institute and currently works as an arts educator in New York City. Her work has appeared in group shows both nationally and internationally. She currently lives and creates in Brooklyn with her wife, Karen, and kid, Sal.
I am interested in the idea of sielunmaisema, a Finnish word meaning the soul’s landscape. My photographic work chases this soul-scape as it explores the concept of power and myth through textiles and masks.
The Invisible Móðir series exemplifies the concept of being hidden and completely present in plain sight. I am a myth in the making while chasing the myth of the mother.
The invisible or hidden mothers were an invention of necessity. Early pioneering photographers had to wait hours for camera exposures. Even though exposure times had been drastically cut down to about 30 seconds by Victorian times, mothers still had to go to very strange and creepy-looking measures to get their children to sit still for baby photos. Babies had to be held by their mothers who, with the best of intentions, hid themselves in peculiar ways so they could calm their babies and also stay out of their children’s pictures.
-The Hidden Mothers, Linda Fregni Nagler
For me, the Móðir series references the Victorian images, while also referencing the invisible mother within. I feel mother non-conforming, unsure of how I am a part of and embody the role. There is an invisible mother in me that I cannot yet make a part of my identity, and yet it can feel that mother may be the only visible aspect of myself. Many former selves are now in the shadows of this bigger thing that muscled in—mother. Being cloaked or concealed frees me from definition and grants the power to move in this new world.
