Caitlin Marie Driver
- 9 hours ago
- 2 min read
Caitlin Marie Driver is a textile and installation artist who has exhibited mostly in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Recent exhibitions include multiple showings at the Milwaukee Art Museum, The Names Gallery in Vienna, Tasha Rae Jewelry in Bayview, Wisconsin, and State Fair Grounds in Milwaukee.
Some of the most notable works by Caitlin Marie Driver include Counsel Table Pieces for the Bench, Bar, and Gallery, a body of work entailing 8 pieces of mixed-media textile fragments. The textiles contain shredded legal documents, bioplastic, and embroidery thread. These works portray a symbolism of original jewelry art lost because of a store owner’s neglected duties of returning consigned jewelry when the store permanently closed in 2018. Such nonfiction narrative becomes apparent in the sense of distress within the forms. The anti-decorative elements of loose fiber threads and frozen documents which appear like paste, are in many cases assembled in a manner similar to a wreath. In this regard, the works are much like artifacts or mementos, a commemoration of lost memories or experiences.
Beast and tribal-like, Counsel Table Pieces for the Bench, Bar, and Gallery portrays the fiber material as elements which ominously flow outward from the wreath-like artworks. Containing angular distortions as well as triangles and diamond-shapes interlocking with one another in chains, the works are as a result asymmetrical and unpredictable. The Counsel Table… series is at times assembled much like a mini firepit or campfire, as piles of pale debris accumulate on the surface, as if to signal a foreshadowing sfumato of unforeseen events and narrative. With an aesthetic built on pale surfaces and unfamiliar geometry, the series very much has ethereal and apparitional qualities, as if these were the fragments of ghostly figures attempting to communicate to us through a lost and forgotten dimension.
Counsel Table Pieces for the Bench, Bar, and Gallery V. 8 (pictured above) is the most unusual piece within the series. V. 8, unlike the rest of the works, is assembled as a singular pile of debris as opposed to a wreath-like form. This assemblage of textiles and other mixed media flows on the surface much like a dead or dying animal, as the ominous loose threads flow outward from the central mound composition.
With a talent for unique form and assembled ingenuity, the textile installations of Caitlin Marie Driver reveal mysterious and ominous narratives through unfamiliar combinations of angular shapes and fragments. These loose fibers which outwardly flow from the pieces reveal a grasping towards forbidden knowledge, especially when tied to the lost mementos and artifacts these works allude to. Much like the lost jewelry the Counsel Table Pieces for the Bench, Bar, and Gallery series alludes to, these beautiful yet haunting forms are mourning a sense of loss of lost art taken by neglect rather than naturally. The cavity within the series reveals the hollowness within our sense of identity and lives. In immense complexity, these wreath, tribalistic textile forms reveal an unnerving aesthetic and foreshadowing contemplations and ruminations we can only begin to imagine.
