Caroline Gore

Caroline Gore in Philadelphia Studio, November 2014

photo: Patricia Huston

Caroline Gore is an artist currently working in Philadelphia. She recently joined the faculty at The University of the Arts as an Associate Professor of Jewelry/Metals in the Craft & Material Studies program.  Gore holds a BFA in Crafts with a jewelry focus from Virginia Commonwealth University and her MFA in Metal Design from East Carolina University. Although her studio practice is rooted in jewelry and metalsmithing, her work varies in media, scale and implementation – ranging from jewelry to sculptural installations, photography and large-scale drawings.

In 2012, she was awarded a sabbatical from teaching, the exhibition …mercurial silence… was the result of this intense period of time spent in studio where through research and experimentation she plumbed deeper into material meaning, the histories jewelry and objects hold and our unique ability to process memory though remembering, forgetting and transforming. 

Gore’s lecture at Yuma will reveal the research and investigations that led to the work in the exhibition.

www.carolinegore.com

...mercurial silence...

The exhibition …mercurial silence… is the culmination of an investigation of how grief and loss manifest in society. Comparative meanings were sought through multidisciplinary research of historical jewelry, Roman myth, and materials and objects as they relate to commonalities across human experience.

Memorializing tragic events through leaving objects and ephemera at sites of violence and tragedy is now pervasive: in doing so we attempt to process what has happened, honor victims, and give some physical form to loss. However this was not the case 30 years ago – we tended to walk away from the actual site and perhaps more directly towards one another.

Looking closer at objects in relation to personal losses – how does one thoughtfully negotiate possessions of loved ones received through inheritance? As in processing grief there is no clear answer, instead we search our lived experience as it reveals itself over time through remembering and forgetting. Objects we have lived with, that others have chosen and lived with, are often murky and become laden with a multitude of meaning. Transformation of these objects, while at first may seem an act of violence in itself, offers to make the negotiation physical – despite the persistence of grief continually marking and changing the interior of ourselves.

Caroline Gore, installation view of ...mercurial silence... at Western Michigan University, Kerr gallery, 2014 reclaimed cherry from inherited furniture, jet, black spinel, silk, 18K gold, oxidized sterling silver, brass, seven identical silk dresses, tintypes, black glass ambrotypes, photo: Caroline Gore