Artist Statement
I am a multidisciplinary artist who creates sculptures, installations and performances that use and reference the body as it relates to issues within our culture and the environment. My interests are in exploring intimacy and connectiveness, especially with machines interacting and consuming humans in a technological digitized world. In creating this work, I investigate how the more fragile organic materials interact with machine-made materials which are designed to be perfect, a critical look at how the future might look and also an examination of the future femme. As such, the work intentionally takes up space physically and emotionally.
I often take photographs before making my work and using transparent images along with ceramics, light, resin, and pipes/tubes will create the work. I glue, screw, climb ladders, saw wood and use a pressure tank for resin pieces - often connecting the pieces together by any means necessary. I utilize architecture and light to include emotional spaces. My work is often built with blocks, repeating objects with a sense of creating a unique surreal place. By design the sculptures are complicated as I layer multiple ideas or images through stacking, hanging, and compressing. Mirroring what I see around me, I use transparent materials as a way of revealing and reflecting. I’m interested in the stories of people around me and so I want to see you reflected through the work. When creating with clay, I return to moments in the Vermont woods and now use ceramics as a way to coalesce memory with permanent materials. The vessels, the object, become the means to whisper past lives, both for you and me.
Concepts of memory and time carry through all my work, including body memory and trauma-based memory. I make physical manifestations of our bodies which carry history and emotion from generation to generation. I translate our sense of identity, our feelings of inadequacy into an object that you can walk around, manipulating and re-organizing as a means to continually squeeze out new means of seeing and remembering.
Biography
Caitlin Miller’s work is defined by her unique personal history – early years of living off the land and with no electricity or running water and later living in NY and London where her art practice began in the shadow of an intensely hedonistic lifestyle. Caitlin began her art studies while taking an experimental sculpture class at St. Martins School of Art. She moved on to the Chelsea College of Art for a BFA and MFA in Sculpture. When Caitlin moved back to New York City in 2000, she kept making artwork and exhibiting while also developing her business skills within the art world at the Artist’s Rights Society and then at The Art Newspaper. Currently, she works as an artist in Gowanus, Brooklyn while raising a child with her wife. She is dedicated to making art and creating sculptures that challenge and illuminate.