Carolyn Sweeney

Carolyn Sweeney is an artist and teacher based in Portland, Oregon. She has a BA in Fine Art from Whitman College. After completing her BA, she studied textiles at Oregon College of Art and Craft. Her years of volunteer work with a local forest defense group gave her a strong connection to the ecosystems of Oregon. She continues to experiment in the studio with botanical and mineral color, foraged from neighborhood walks and trips to nearby forests and rivers. She teaches classes on making mineral watercolors, botanical inks, lake pigments, and pastels.


Artist Statement

Color is not an abstraction. In these pieces, every color comes from a particular place, a particular plant, mineral, or fungi. Each individual color brings questions into the studio, and I attempt to answer these endless questions on paper. My work documents my collaborations with the very material under my feet. Color is a language humans first learned through the land, whether that be a soft red ochre or the black of charcoal on a burned stick. I am slowly reviving that original artistic language. I want to know color as a companion, the green rock that tumbles down along the edge of the Clackamas River, the bright orange mushroom that comes up after the first rain of the late summer. Color can root us.

I use a variety of papers to hold the evidence of color. Some have been dipped in plant dye, others painted with pigments bound in tree sap. I fold the paper in a repeating pattern, transforming it from a simple surface into a form with its own presence. The shadows created by the folds bring dimension to the color because color is not one dimensional. It shifts with the light. Wet color goes on evenly, as the paint or dye in the background of most of the pieces. While dry color, in the form of handmade pastels, has a textural directionality. These contrasts serve to highlight the variables that make each color unique.


carolynsweeney.com