Carol Sommer Durham, United Kingdom
I am a visual artist and art educator based in the North East of England. I’m interested in the potential of piracy to interrogate value systems. Sometimes within the aesthetic context of conceptual writing, my practice includes text based work, video and an Instagram account @cartography_for_girls.
Through video, I try and answer some of the questions that I think about, including questions raised for example by Minimalist Sculpture, and whether sometimes thinking about painting is a good thing or a bad thing (that question came from a thought of a character in an Iris Murdoch novel). In 2019 I completed a practice led Ph.D. at Leeds Beckett University; my thesis was titled ‘Contingent form and the feminine in the novels of Iris Murdoch’. I am the author of Cartography for Girls, an A-Z of Orientations Identified within the Novels of Iris Murdoch. I'm a co-founder of blimey! a female led Darlington based arts collective, and a research associate of Women In Parenthesis. I currently teach fine art and critical and contextual studies in art and design at Queen Elizabeth Sixth Form College, Darlington.
Artwork
Diagonals, Single Channel Video, 2024
Lever, Single Channel Video, 2024
Sometimes She tried To Think About Painting, Single Channel Video, 2021 - 2023
Cartography for Girls An A-Z of Orientations Identified within the Novels of Iris Murdoch, Book, 2016
From One To The Other, Single Channel Video, 2015
The Sea, The Sea, Single Channel Video, 2018
I Think I'm Happy, She Thought, But Am I Real?, Postcard design, 2019
This Has Nothing To Do With Easter, Video, 2021
Projects and exhibitions
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Sometimes she tried to think about painting16/03/2024 — ongoing A video exploring the empowering potential of the moving image in relation to Iris Murdoch's thinking about Eros, a force which might be productively harnessed in the act of painting. Showed at 36 Gallery Newcastle in August 2022 and as part of 'Are You A Woman In Authority?' curated by Lizz Brady, Broken Grey Wires, Autumn 2023, Pineapple... [Read more] |
Baltic, Gateshead | Details |
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Let Us Eat Cake Part 308/03/2022 The video is a collation of Instagram posts shared @cartography_for_girls, between March 2020 and March 2022. They respond to Iris Murdoch's fictional writing about women's experience and to the lockdowns via the representation of women in film. |
Basecamp Boro, Middlesbrough | Details |
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Will The Real Iris Murdoch Please Stand Up?03/03/2022 — 03/07/2022 Through a series of workshops at the Iris Murdoch Archive, Kingston University, and an online call out on social media, ‘Will The Real Iris Murdoch Please Stand Up?’ explored the construction of image and identity through the twentieth century universe of Iris Murdoch and twenty-first century Instagram. In 2016 I made a book,... [Read more] |
Iris Murdoch Archives, Kingston University, Kingston | Details |
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The Summer One, Hun North East24/05/2019 |
Hit The Bar, Middlesbrough | Details |
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I Think I'm Happy, She Thought, But Am I Real?23/05/2019 |
Gas Contemporary, North Shields | Details |
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Reading As Art27/08/2016 — 19/11/2016 Curated by Simon Morris |
Bury Art Museum and Sculpture Gallery, Bury | Details |