{"id":574,"date":"2010-10-06T07:25:06","date_gmt":"2010-10-06T13:25:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15bytes12\/2010\/10\/06\/kathleen-carricaburu\/"},"modified":"2025-10-23T19:25:46","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T02:25:46","slug":"kathleen-carricaburu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/kathleen-carricaburu\/","title":{"rendered":"Kathleen Carricaburu: When Worlds Come Together"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>To any who believe culture is in the DNA, Kathleen Carricaburu\u2019s experience may serve as an example. When, after years of exploring different mediums, she discovered metal she had an epiphany. \u201cI felt like I had come home,\u201d she says. Carricaburu\u2019s 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. \u201cBoth 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cI 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.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cIt\u2019s about metaphor in art and will use clay as well as metal and human figures. I\u2019m doing \u2018cabinets of curiosity\u2019 in which the human body will be the cabinet. So it\u2019s more abstract – each one will be an allegory which is like a narrative with a cast of metaphors.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201c… is about love that I could never have, that\u2019s 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.\u201d She\u2019s also working on a head-dress that\u2019s based on ancient Chinese \u2018trembling pieces\u2019 such as crowns that have a butterfly or flower made of kingfisher feathers in which some parts tremble. She\u2019s planning a \u201ctrembling comb\u201d made out of jade. Other allegories for this installation are of water, of the desert, and of the garden. \u201cIt\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Daphne and Apollo, finger of Jupiter by Kathleen Carricaburu<\/p><\/div>\n

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Reliquary for Tears by Kathleen Carricaburu<\/p><\/div>\n

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Reliquary for Secrets by Kathleen Carricaburu<\/p><\/div>\n

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In the Clover by Kathleen Carricaburu<\/p><\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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,\u00a0<\/strong>and part of the year here in Salt Lake City. She acknowledges that living in two places isn\u2019t 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\u2019t anticipate being in Mesilla permanently.<\/p>\n

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Kathleen Carricaburu’s garden in Mesilla, New Mexico<\/p><\/div>\n

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. \u2018I think a lot of people are doing crafts here — there\u2019s Pioneer Craft House, and you see a lot more good crafts at the Farmer\u2019s Market in Liberty Park now, but once you reach a certain level in contemporary craft I don\u2019t think there are really any places people can go.\u201d She recalls that in school she was taught that painting and sculpture were \u201cimportant\u201d — a daunting idea when what she feels driven to do is display things where one has an interaction between the body and the work.<\/p>\n

In summing up where she is at the present time, she says \u201cI feel like I\u2019ve got a solid foundation, that my work has integrity and that it\u2019s good. My work may not be at the right moment in time, but it has strength. I can stand by it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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View from Kathleen Carricaburu’s studio in Mesilla, New Mexico<\/p><\/div>\n


\nKathleen Carricaburu’s work will be on view at\u00a0Finch Lane Gallery\u00a0through November 12.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To any who believe culture is in the DNA, Kathleen Carricaburu\u2019s experience may serve as an example. When, after years of exploring different mediums, she discovered metal she had an epiphany. \u201cI felt like I had come home,\u201d she says. Carricaburu\u2019s heritage is half Irish and half Basque. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1520,"featured_media":62479,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibition_reviews","category-visual_arts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/10\/030.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-29 18:27:30","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1520"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=574"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97239,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574\/revisions\/97239"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}