T5 ARTIST CASE STUDY: Carolyn Craig
- 3 days ago
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Carolyn Craig is an Australian interdisciplinary artist based in Sydney. Craig holds a PhD from the Queensland College of Art and currently teaches printmaking at the National Art School in Sydney.
Craig's work often examines how social structures influence how individuals are perceived and positioned within society. Through performance, printmaking, and installation, she explores the systems and expectations that influence identity and behaviour. Her work asks questions about power, the body, and how people are placed into social categories. She often considers these ideas through the concept of habitus, developed by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, which describes how social background and cultural experiences shape the way people think, act, and understand the world.
Artistic Practice and Conceptual Framework:
Craig’s work investigates what she describes as the "coded construction of subjectivity," exploring how bodies operate within larger systems of meaning and power. She approaches this investigation through what she describes as a dispersed representational practice. Rather than presenting a single stable image of the self, she often creates fragmented or layered works that emerge through performative actions, documentation, and print processes. These fragments are then translated into artworks that destabilise conventional representation and reveal the underlying structures that shape social identity.
Her work often starts with performances or actions that take place in specific locations. She records these moments through photographs, sound, movement, or other digital traces. These recordings then become material she works with in the studio. Craig reworks them using printmaking techniques such as etching and photopolymer printing. By turning these actions into printed images, the work moves between the original physical event and its recorded or reproduced form.
In this way, Craig does not use printmaking only as a technique to make images. She also uses it to explore ideas. The way printmaking repeats and reproduces images reflects how social rules and expectations are repeated in society. By altering and experimenting with these processes, she shows how identity is built through many layers of images, meanings, and representations.
So, to be clear here within the studio environment I am consistently photographing a range of gestural actions and delineated line work that are both aligned with what it is I am investigating. These photographs and drawings are then printed out as a photocopy in direct proportional relationship to the imagined finished piece. Now the photocopies constantly produce errors such as running lines and random marks motivated by fragments of pigment and the toner that I then incorporate into the finished piece of work. Throughout these processes of reproduction, I find the residue of white noise that asserts itself onto the paper – this analogue error – is a thing of great beauty and accordingly something to work with. And so it is in this sense that I am particularly interested in the production of a multiplicity of images and taking each image through a range of differing reprographic processes. In a way to observe what the works can withstand. This methodology utilises the lowbrow technology of the photocopy machine, for which I have had a life long obsession. The photocopier erases and inscribes as a drawing machine – through its very reproductive process. Integration of reprographic media within an inter-disciplinary practice can allow the symbolic residues of knowledge and power distribution networks to operate as key elements in print practices that query “the way in which systemic or pervasive political and cultural structures are enacted and reproduced through individual acts and practices. I have always loved working within this reprographic process. It is something I can honestly say that I am addicted to. It is a love that is directly relational to my childhood experience in that when I was seven I had three photocopiers in my bedroom. And yes in retrospect I can clearly see this as falling outside of what it is we consider normal. And yet from this seemingly abnormal space arrives the copy: the copy that is not quite the copy, that changes the original toward something that is steeped in the overall idea of production as opposed to a direct form of representation and it is precisely this that reprographic media can do exceedingly well. - Carolyn Craig
Relevance to my practice:
Carolyn Craig's practice connects closely within the ideas behind my practice. We both explore how identity is shaped by larger systems rather than existing as something fixed or complete.
In Craig's work, the body becomes a place where social power, language, and representation come together. In a similar way, my project looks at how identity can become fragmented and shifted through technology and structured systems. The use of algorithmic tessellation in the project relates to Craig's interest in reproduction through printmaking.
Her approach to fragmentation is especially relevant. Instead of presenting the self as a single, stable portrait, she allows identity to appear spread across different materials, performances, and images. This idea connects with the structure of my project, where the self-portrait is divided across several artworks and systems, including the sliding puzzle, layered experiments on different materials, and suspended installations.
Her working method also provides an example of how ideas can be translated into physical materials. Craig moves between performance, digital documentation, and printmaking to create complex visual structures. This is similar to my art practice.
References:
Craig, C 2026, Carolyn Craig, Carolyn Craig Studio, viewed 14 March 2026, <https://www.carolyncraig.com>.
More Than Reproduction 2026, Carolyn Craig, More Than Reproduction, viewed 14 March 2026, <https://morethanreproduction.com/carolyn-craig>. Panoptic Press 2016, Carolyn Mackenzie-Craig: Gambit Lines, online video, YouTube, viewed 14 March 2026, <https://youtu.be/iR2KaNI9a2g>.
Panoptic Press 2016, Carolyn Mackenzie-Craig, Panoptic Press, viewed 14 March 2026, <https://panopticpress.net/home-page/article-index/carolyn-mackensie-craig-2/>.
Parker Contemporary 2026, Carolyn Craig, Parker Contemporary, viewed 14 March 2026, <https://www.parkercontemporary.com.au/artists/carolyn-craig>.
