Unearthed: Caroline Wright

Art, place, and growing are entangled, like roots under the soil. Unearthed is an exhibition comprising ceramics, paintings, and other work by Caroline Wright. The work has been made in tandem with the tending of a plot of land, each informing the other.

Unearthed is part of Plot, a year-long project that brings together growth, art, and food, offering glimpses into an uncertain future. Comprising paintings, drawings, archiving, and sound, Plot documents the transformation of a piece of overgrown land into a place for food production, with visitors from different spheres of life as invited guests. Plot received bursary funding from AN The Artists Information Company.

Plot's own account of the ground it works from: a place shapes you, its colours, its sounds, the way the air feels in the morning, and that seeps into the way you make things. Art is basically a conversation with your surroundings, even if you don't notice it.

Growing is the slow part. The same plot, the same soil, the undergrowth, it changes insidiously, suddenly looking different because you've changed. The work becomes a record of those shifts, a map of abundance or desert, according to the weather and the ability to understand how to tend the land. Growth doesn't always look impressive; sometimes it's noticing that a weed is just a plant out of place, or the light is falling differently as the sun moves across the sky.

In her work, artist Caroline Wright explores coastal and inland edgelands where human and nonhuman life interact with a changing environment. Taking a phenomenological approach as a way to understand the shifts of a world in flux, for example, walking on the land and now swimming over it, and tending unproductive ground to become fertile soil, her work captures a moment within a state of fluid metamorphosis. Moving freely between drawing, printmaking, painting and three dimensions, her work often responds to sites where the dualities of loss and gain are uncomfortable neighbours.