To any who believe culture is in the DNA, Kathleen Carricaburu’s experience may serve as an example. When, after years of exploring different mediums, she discovered metal she had an epiphany. “I felt like I had come home,” she says. Carricaburu’s heritage is half Irish and half Basque. She has been influenced by both cultures and like some historians believes the Basques and the Celts could have been one united culture at some time in the past. “Both cultures were very into metal-smithing — the metal smith was like the monk; they were in a clerical role. There was also a deep connection to nature in both.”
At one time Carricaburu was a graphic designer, but she soon realized she wanted to be a fine artist and so pursued her bachelor degree at the University of Utah. She began as a painter, but found disciplining herself to paint was difficult and began creating 3-dimensional works. She then moved from the plastic to the poetic. “I was kind of confused. I took a poetry class with Craig Arnold, who was really receptive to what I was doing, and helped me get financing so I could spend a year studying poetry.” Still, she felt pulled by the wish to make art and thought the literary work was in conflict with her visual art. She continued to search, working in museums and as a librarian.
The literary and the visual came together when Carricaburu realized she could weld her affinity for metal with her work in poetry to create objects infused with metaphor. She decided to go to graduate school at New Mexico State University to pursue her vision. She has now completed the written portion of her thesis, and this December will reveal the installation component of her work. “It’s about metaphor in art and will use clay as well as metal and human figures. I’m doing ‘cabinets of curiosity’ in which the human body will be the cabinet. So it’s more abstract – each one will be an allegory which is like a narrative with a cast of metaphors.”
Carricaburu is currently working on the allegory of air. There will be an actual woman standing against a wall, wearing a jewelry piece, and behind her on the wall will be various objects like a fan, a kite, butterfly, air-borne seeds, and maybe even a bubble-blower. The main piece on the woman “… is about love that I could never have, that’s just like in the air …. so I knit a tiny net, cast it and the strings in silver, and there are little rose buds tied to it like a kite.” She’s also working on a head-dress that’s based on ancient Chinese ‘trembling pieces’ such as crowns that have a butterfly or flower made of kingfisher feathers in which some parts tremble. She’s planning a “trembling comb” made out of jade. Other allegories for this installation are of water, of the desert, and of the garden. “It’s all about knowledge and how we organize it. I like that in the 19th-century, although scientists were starting to go for scientific reasoning, they sometimes put things together more poetically.”
Her current work at Finch Lane Gallery, though smaller in scale and scope — she calls it contemporary fine art jewelry — is also filled with metaphor. There is a poetic grace, beauty and philosophy communicated with each piece. The viewer is likely to feel a bitter-sweet emotional wrench when looking at pieces such as “Reliquary for Tears”, or “Reliquary for Secrets”. For a more light-hearted experience, “In the Clover” evokes optimism and sheer pleasure at the exquisite manner in which the piece was wrought in metals.
As a metalsmith Carricaburu makes a good deal of jewelry, and does well through the Sundance Gallery. She lives part of the year in Mesilla, New Mexico, and part of the year here in Salt Lake City. She acknowledges that living in two places isn’t easy, but it has been a good adventure for her and her husband, and she feels very lucky that he has been supportive of her work. The remoteness of her home in New Mexico has been a positive influence on her art, but she doesn’t anticipate being in Mesilla permanently.
Anticipating a full-time return to Salt Lake Carricaburu is interested in helping evolve the local fine art craftwork, using her experience studying at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. ‘I think a lot of people are doing crafts here — there’s Pioneer Craft House, and you see a lot more good crafts at the Farmer’s Market in Liberty Park now, but once you reach a certain level in contemporary craft I don’t think there are really any places people can go.” She recalls that in school she was taught that painting and sculpture were “important” — a daunting idea when what she feels driven to do is display things where one has an interaction between the body and the work.
In summing up where she is at the present time, she says “I feel like I’ve got a solid foundation, that my work has integrity and that it’s good. My work may not be at the right moment in time, but it has strength. I can stand by it.”
Carol Fulton got her degree in radio and television production a long time ago. She was born in Brazil and lived in many countries. Now retired from the airline industry, she dabbles in oil painting and found-object sculpture.
Categories: Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts