2024

STATEMENT OF ARTIST - Carola Compa 
2024 Ladies of many lands, born in Sweden" 

Carola’s journey of moving away from her homeland and stepping into a multicultural expat community expanded her understanding of femininity and the varied challenges women face across cultures. Inspired by the resilience and beauty of women navigating lives shaped by trauma, she created this series as a tribute to their journeys. The names in this series aren’t tied to specific women but are drawn from statistics of the most common female names in the countries her female friends call home, at the time they were born (1970s). 

This series is a natural extension of Carola’s artistic practice, where she works with clay allowing her to engage in sensory experimentation journey through her hands. “I take pleasure in exploring movements and spaces, allowing the clay to guide me until I discover the perfect movement for each piece.” Alongside these creative explorations, she adheres to self-imposed aesthetic principles, such as the 'French Curve' principle—a juxtaposed network of curves that create voids or voids that create curves—the Moebius strip's eternal flow, and the interplay of light on surfaces.

Beyond these constraints, Carola is interested in pushing the material to its limits, striving to find the point just before collapse. This daring approach demands an intimate connection with the material, operating at the cellular level to add elements that achieve different textures and tensions. While the material determines thicknesses, tensions, and supporting structures, it's the artist's unwavering commitment to unearthing the essence of void's energy, the perpetual rhythm of curves, and the potential of the material that gives birth to these sculptures, rendering them both delicate and powerful.