Carolyn Craig - Conversations of lament, 2024

Born in Australia, lives and works in Sydney.

Carolyn’s gestural performances harness absurdity to critique the limiting frameworks of how we define “cultural normativity”.

Using photography and print as an active site of inscriptive performance of the body, Craig investigates established tropes and stereotypes with a particular focus on the idea of "habitus" as discussed by Pierre Bourdieu.

Contemporary society likes to distance itself from the spectral shadow of superstition and ritual yet we continue to demarcate subjects based on primal ideas of filth and contagion. Subjects of low capital value are relationally soiled whilst high value persons are associated with purity and hygiene. Craig’s personal history follows her in life like a spectral cloud of dust – it hovers over opportunity with abjection. It leaks into the tidy boardrooms of men with contagion and fear. Craig keeps trying to make herself clean enough for social acceptance and remembers her mothers voice telling her that brooms are the symbol of poor women all over the world – we sweep up the dirt of Others.