new work – carrie powell

Photo credit: Kaitlin Chow

Photo credit: Kaitlin Chow, Carrie Powell tex/texture painting

Photo credit: Kaitlin Chow

Photo credit: Kaitlin Chow, Carrie Powell touch up painting on installation

In the spring of 2015 I was asked to be a conceptual collaborator with Dance Artist-Educator Olive Prince, and Designer Kaitlin Chow. Olive and I initially met on a random winter day at our neighborhood library. Our kids were our inital link, but our drive to secure our own creative identities within the process of motherhood was the integral component that made us deeply relate to each other beyond being moms. “Of Our Remnants” commenced our first formal collaboration and went on to be an acclaimed Fringe performance. (More photos of the piece as well as excerpts of my writing for it will soon we on the site…) In the initial stage of the collaborative process a cutting-edge way of working together emerged. We coined this burgeoning artistic collaboration as an “In-the Round Reciprocity”.

This somatic philosophy is an embodied encounter between both artists. In the case of “Of Our Remnants“, I viewed movement investigations and then personified them into evocative affect writing and drawings, feeling what the dancers were expressing through movement and translating it into prose. Olive in turn used the drawings and prose as seeds for choreographic intention and movement matter with the dancers. Each dancer involved in the process then investigated the aesthetic material by distilling the prose into a unique movement vocabulary.

We believe this artistic process creates movement that combines technical virtuosity with energetic resonance, and by blending disciplines we are setting a foundation for work that is rich in meaning, and inquiry. We see this creative process as having a place both in the work of Dance Art/Education, and as a therapeutic process. We are currently working to develop different strategies and processes to take our “In The Round Reciprocity” concept further into the community, as well as developing a new work, “Silent tide”.

I am interested in the shape and form that clothing make, both when it thinly hangs and drapes in a closet and when patterns and textures collide in piles that are waiting to be folded and put away. Clothing piles have been a long standing visual interest for me, but have become a predominant source of inspiration since becoming a mother. I can vividly remember the first few months of parenting, feeling like the piles of clothes could morph and multiply exponentially. Now a few years deep into parental routines I am issuing a declaration for creative routines even in the act of “doing laundry”, hence this website as a container for the ongoing expressions in all of my domains.

Both laundry and art are essential tasks in creating a functional home environment. Laundry is a cooperative act in the washing, and predominately is folded, sorted, and put away by me. The motions may be tedious but my perception has become a vantage point, a place to see beyond the mundane presentation of the tangible object into another world where art is made out of the monotony. This excites me.

Seeking an antidote to the commonplace activities of living in the midst of motherhood is compelling to me. Each of my roles: mother, artist, collaborator, healer, therapist, etc can seed inspiration to another. There is reciprocity. This is nourishing the many facets of my identity. Superimposing new insights and ways to be present within each process.