OTOMYS: A number of your artworks depict maternal figures. What draws you to explore maternal relationships?
Caroline Cornelius: As a mother to three daughters, I am keen to explore maternal relationships and social expectations. I have a family history where for the last few generations the family unit has rarely survived intact. My grandmother lived apart from my own mother. When my mother became a parent, she rejected her childhood experience and threw herself into domesticity. My mother moved constantly around us, in a role of invisible servitude. All of this has led me to create contemporary art that observes the many ways women are enslaved by society’s expectations of motherhood.
OTOMYS: You have a background in textiles prior to becoming a fine artist. How does this previous profession (if at all) materialise in your current practice?
Caroline Cornelius: My first love is colour and texture which originally led me to textiles, my love for colour remains foremost in how I express myself in my art practice.
OTOMYS: What is the role of memory in your artistic practice?
Caroline Cornelius: Memory guides us to what we hold as important. I create artworks using photographs, drawings from observation and my imagination. But it’s important to me that the subject feels remembered and recognisable and for that I rely on the values of memory.
OTOMYS: Your more recent works see you utilising saturated colour. What is your relationship to colour? And how does it inspire you?
Caroline Cornelius: The more I use colour the more I find to explore in it. Initially I used saturated colour in my work because a part of the work was about visibility and the invisibility of being an older woman. But there is always so much to understand with colour, too many saturates overpower each other so its always a balancing act with chromatic greys and proportions of complimentary colours. When it works, I find colour to be extremely emotive.
OTOMYS: Can you speak to your relationships with the various mediums you work in?
Caroline Cornelius: I spent 2023 participating in ‘The Drawing Year’ at the Royal Drawing School, London. It is a scholarship, postgraduate program where we drew every day in the Life Room, Studio, in the natural environment and within art in museums. We worked across watercolour, chalk pastel, pencil, oil pastel and charcoal. It has meant that I don’t feel restricted by a particular medium. More recently in my studio I am painting with a combination of acrylic, oil and raw pigment to obtain the purest colour, depth and layers. I believe that every medium has its own superpower so it’s exciting to put them together and get the best out of them.
