Lyn Carter: A review by Michael Griffiths

Lyn Carter
Knit 2, 2003
Fabric and found objects
Installed: 145.5 x 35 x 18 cm
Photograph: Peter MacCallum

Lyn Carter is an artist who defies easy categorisation. Throughout her career and into the present day she has refused to stay within a certain genre, allowing this friction to manifest itself in the ambiguity of her work.

Carter is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, and has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across Canada, the United States and Europe since the 1980s. Carter was in Sydney for an exhibition held from July to September 2007 at Object Gallery. Making and Meaning: Craft in the 21st Century featured nine national and international artists whose techniques blurred the lines between art and craft. Carter also ran a series of workshops and artist talks in New South Wales and Canberra.

Her early career was shaped by the likes of minimalist Eva Hesse, the pioneering German-Born American sculptor known for her work in three dimensions with everyday materials, and Joyce Wieland, a Canadian experimental filmmaker and abstract textile artist of the 1960s and 70s. As Carter explains in an interview at Object Gallery during her time in Australia, the barriers imposed by the field of sculpture helped shape her artistic direction. "I wanted to go into sculpture but it didn't seem quite right. It was very male-dominated at the time," she says "so I slid into textiles and then wanted to be a textile designer. My leaning towards three dimensions kept coming up."

Lyn Carter
Knit 3, 2004
Fabric, fabricated and found objects
Installed: 187.5 x 40.5 x 13 cm
Photograph: Isaac Applebaum

Possibly as a result of this early reassessment of ideals, feminism also continues to inform Carter's production. Rather than manifesting itself as an explicit facet of her work, it pervades all her output simply through the mode of creation she employs. "I think the way I see my work is that I'm working in sculpture but I brought this domestic activity associated with women to sculpture ... I see it as a more subtle thing."

On display in the Making and Meaning exhibition is a series of wall-mounted sculptures Carter has made from patterned cloths and dollar store plates and platters. While some of her earlier works referenced the body more overtly - 2002's Two (lung) and Double (heart) employ stiff shaped fabric to form representations of clothed organs - her current work does so only in an oblique manner.

"My works are attached to the walls, so often I'm trying to link the scale to body with the architectural presence too," Carter says, "but these ones are more discreet than earlier works." While she creates works that are flat to the wall in the traditional manner of paintings, the viewer is faced with a conflict between consuming them more as three-dimensional pieces, or accepting a two-dimensional reading.

Carter describes her work further, adding that "[my works are] on the wall and are sort of flattened so they're somewhere between sculpture and painting. They imply things in the state of becoming. So they play in these restless edges. They're abstract sculptural pieces but they have all this other subtext going on."

Lyn Carter
Daisy Chain with Black, 2005
Fabric and plastic platters
Installed: 188 x 151 x 2.5 cm
Photograph: Cheryl O'Brien

This is particularly apparent in Daisy Chain with Black, in which the shape of the plastic dollar store plates inspired Carter to evoke the childhood innocence of the daisy chain. The fabric used for this piece, as with others that she creates, eschews the lushness that might be more obviously used in creating beautiful forms. As Carter notes "I really look for fabrics with a slight oddity to them. I want the material to be a bit quirky so when they're put into these other forms they have multiple readings or different readings." Daisy Chain with Black features repeated patterns and arrangements of structure, mimicking the print itself on the fabric used to sheath the plastic plates and connecting strands. Carter notes that she intended making the work circular, but realised that the work in its present unlinked state was more powerful as a representation of a greater 'whole'.

It becomes apparent through observing the pieces on display that Carter is meticulous in the creation of each sculpture. She notes that each one is heavily crafted, held together through sewing of parts rather than use of glue or other less permanent methods. This adds integrity to each piece and can be interpreted as a reaction to the 'throwaway' nature of objects nowadays. Carter laments the "disappearance of the intimate relationship to objects ... so that [they] are seen more and more for their use value in a temporary sense." The meticulous crafting she brings to her creations, where, as she explains, "the fabric becomes both surface and structure," brings a sense of permanence and importance to items that wouldn't initially be expected to hold aesthetic value.

Carter now lectures part time at the Ontario College of Art and Design, which has recently acquired university status. Given the ambiguous nature of her work, hovering between sculpture and painting, it is no surprise to learn of her frustration at the divide between visual arts and craft in academia and practice. Carter notes that she was receiving funding from both streams while working in the 1980s, but that she was told that this was considered 'double-dipping' and that she would have to choose between one or the other. Carter has since received funding solely through the fine arts stream, and says that she feels both welcome and unwelcome in both areas. She is nevertheless philosophical about the divide and sees it narrowing as new students come through and use new technology to create work that can't easily be categorised into either field.

Next up for Carter is an exhibition at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York State where she has just finished installing a large site-specific work. She excitedly explains the processes involved in putting together such a piece within the neo-classical confines of the gallery, noting that this is one of the largest works she has completed. So Carter's journey continues. Moving from place to place, and, as she describes it, taking the ordinary and clothing it in the infinite.

Michael Griffiths
October, 2007

Michael Griffiths is a freelance journalist working in Sydney.