Part of Handwork 2026

About the Artist

Narrative threads of Carletta Carrington Wilson’s (Seattle) literary and visual works merge as poetry, artist books, installations and mixed-media collages mirror the melding of language and form in works described as “decorative with a message.”

Encountering cloth as a constellation, as a geographical expanse and translator of time, Wilson explores the potential and possibility of engaging with fabric and its fabrication in unexpected ways.

The Pacific Northwest’s moody skies, mountain ranges and bodies of water are integral to her artistic practice. It is here that her work has rooted itself, has ascended and descended, has formed structures upon which eye + hand, mouth/tongue/mind conjoin to create text & image reaching across realms of time.

Artist Statement

They, still had themselves then. They knew from whence and where they came and who they were in the world. When did the possession take hold? When did a whole wide-world come to believe that they were transferable goods to be bought and sold, inherited, auctioned off, leased out, owned? Transformed into objects, branded, a possession, someone’s commodity driven to market. There, among the amassing millions, artist/artisan ancestors. How in the reaches of this distant future would any descendant find them except through the memory of blood.

Is not the evidence in the bloodline, the drive, that insistent demand to create, give shape and form to an idea by way of your hands?

The hands, whose hands had not forgotten the loom, axe, forge, dye pot, the damp squeeze of clay as they entered a field, that kitchen, some forest, encountered the stench of that ship. How long, long/long the longing would it take for someone’s hands to re-member themselves?

An object is a door. A way into the way back. It opens the past and I step through that portal. This is not a new, unusual or unique way to work. In the absence of generational knowledge the imagination creates a past that serves as a link to retrieve what has been lost.

I engage with objects as sites of memory. For me, objects are windows, roads upon which I travel to an unknown destination. A destination by which I travel through and with work that works its way through me and into the world.