JODIE CAREY (Kunst)

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1981, BATTLE, UK

Jodie Carey creates ceremonial objects made from mundane materials in which the quality of craftsmanship is displayed. Her installations draw us in with their familiar iconography but when taking a closer look we are being confronted with issues of ritual, artifice and mortality in contemporary Western society. By using craft, skill and time to transform basic lowly materials into the wondrous, the beautiful and the spectacular Carey’s work questions the way we look at the world and transforms daily experience. She offers beauty but at the same time confronts us with the ugliness of life.
This year at Galerie Gabriel Rolt she showed an installation of memorial slabs or monoliths (height approx. 2.5 metres) made of lard and adorned with paper flower arrangements stained with coffee, tea and blood. At once political and personal, it marks Carey’s increasingly universal treatment of the modern condition, broadening her earlier focus on the ceremonious ostentation of Middle England.
Another recent work is ‘Untitled Monument” (2007), a 3 metre high ‘’cenotaph’’ made from 2,000 bones individually cast in plaster and decorated with handcrafted sugar-paste flowers and ivy. According to Carey traditional memorials have an opposite effect: “There is a perversity in that once you commemorate something, it is far easier to walk away. It’s not lest we forget, it’s more lest we remember.”
Spectacular are the three 2.5 metre baroque-inspired chandeliers (Untitled, 2006), made of vacuum dust rolled into tiny balls and then fixed to curved wire frames. Carey: “Hoover dust is the detritus of everyday life. If you die tomorrow, all that would be left of you would be in your Hoover.”
The work of Jodie Carey is increasingly sought after. It has been acquired by Charles Saatchi, David Roberts, Hauser and Wirth and Kay Saatchi, she exhibited at Hauser and Wirth in Zurich and in the group show Anticipation, curated by Kay Saatchi and exhibited at David Roberts Gallery in London. Carey graduated in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College in London in 2005 and from the Royal College of Arts in London in 2007.

http://www.jodiecarey.co.uk