Caroline Attan - These Fleeting Days

About

Caroline Attan’s works are characterised by generic circular grids that underpin meticulously folded paper forms, creating geometric and rotating compositions. The titles are suggestive of a deeply personal response to the content of the poems that inspire her and particular moments in time. Her circular compositions are infinite, with no apparent beginning or end.

The poetry of Pablo Neruda is a particular influence on Attan’s work. Neruda’s explorations of conflicting emotions of desire, humour, anger, frustration and affection are translated into intricate combinations of text and delicately folded coloured paper. Attan’s personal language of expanding and contracting, concentric circles seeks to interpret the sentiments and ideas conveyed in the written narratives that inspire her.

Background and foreground, light and dark, large and small, the revealed and the concealed are all oppositional elements that come together in Attan’s work. Meticulously constructed pictures are created through a certain personal rigour, connection and discipline using very specific methods.

For this exhibition Attan has produced a new body of works she describes as ‘tonal’ that pare back her otherwise vibrant palette to muted hues of greys, browns and deep berry reds. The gentle oscillation of autumnal shades is punctuated by vibrant pops of saturated pinks and oranges, focused accents upon waves of colour. These new works demonstrate the breadth of Attan’s practice, taking a regimented process, pushing it to the boundaries and showing us the vast possibilities of the interaction between colour, shape and text