Crisps, toilet-paper, plastic bags, supermarket packaging, rubbish and furniture are some of the raw materials used by Caroline McCarthy in considering notions of value and taste inherent in the surface of everyday objects, images and modes of display. Positioned in response to a culture of mass production, where every kind of experience, fantasy or sense of one’s place in the world is pre-determined through some form of packaging, the work employs humor and other strategies of intervention to investigate the space between ideological facade and the concrete materiality of things.

The processes involved, of re-working and re-presentation, are driven by a desire to temporarily take ownership of this borrowed material, instead of being owned by it; to create a space where one can poke at the aesthetic codes, while at the same time utilizing those codes to arrive at a new proposition, which makes another, perhaps absurd or contradictory, kind of sense.

McCarthy’s solo exhibitions include Parker's Box Gallery, New York, Green On Red Gallery, Dublin, Ireland, King's College London, UK, Hoet Bekaert Gallery, Ghent, Gimpel Fils Gallery, London, Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer, Düsseldorf and most recently a permanent installation for the Cicely Saunders Institute, commissioned by King’s College London in association with the Contemporary Art Society.Recent group exhibitions include Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, and CASS, London Metropolitan University, London.

Courtesy of Green on Red Gallery