2023
Philadelphia fiber artist Caitlin McCormack creates works of somber delicacy and a deliciously subtle flavor of strange humor (the best kind of humor!) At turns whimsical, vulnerable, and unsettling, ghostly avian skeletal remains and vibrant floral forms tenderly chained with fragile lace, memories trapped in knots, via cotton, glue, and a deftly flashing crochet hook.
A personal taxonomy of hybrid anthropomorphic specimens acts as emotive artifact and memento mori, evoking imagery of folklore, medieval botanical imagery, and osteological displays, and explores gender and sexuality, isolation, traumatic recollections, familial legacy, and anxieties regarding ways in which we inhabit and care for the planet.
By using media, skills, and practices inherited from beloved departed relatives, Caitlin generates emblems of a diminishing bloodline, representing both the persistence (and warping) of memory and the significance of cloth and thread in human experience.
See below for a gallery of my favorite works from this breathtaking artist and you can see Caitlin McCormack’s work “Cold Soil Kettle” in the pages of my curated gallery of midnight shadows, The Art of Darkness: A Treasury of the Morbid, Melancholic, and Macabre.
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