About 

Caroline Lambard’s multi-disciplinary practice moves between a range of mediums, including installation, drawing, collage and sculpture.  Her work incorporates everyday materials including threads and newspapers which she reinvents in a playful way, defamiliarising them and giving them fantastical new forms.

At the centre of the practice is the making and experiential qualities of three dimensional form.

With a background in industrial design, her work blurs the lines between art, architecture and functionality.  A shift away from design and towards a more intuitive practice began once the characteristics of materials became central to the making process.  Works range from large scale installations to intricate thread sculptures and drawings on paper, in a dialogue between artist, materials and space.

Caroline looks at how three-dimensionality is sensed, with particular emphasis on aspects of depth, distance and the effects of movement.  As the viewer moves through an installation or around a sculpture, the shifting viewpoints and motional parallax gradually map out a sense of the form in the mind.  Many works also direct the attention, so that while an entire underlying structure will remain visible, it’s the highlighted parts that catch the eye and define the form.

The collages and drawings look at similar relationships of form and space from different perspectives.  The collages involve constructions of fragmented images across two and three dimensions, while the drawings, in two dimensions, define depth through chiaroscuro (light and shade) and express movement through flow, along with a sense of what she refers to as visual gravity.

Caroline Lambard’s practice is complex and evades straightforward explanation.  The work has a precision which is applied in an improvised, spontaneous manner.  The resulting mix of order, disruption and response often produces forms and patterns reminiscent of those found in the natural world.  She brings together the structural and the sensory, immersing the viewer in works which develop over time, or showing how changing viewpoints can apparently shape-shift forms.  In this way she takes us back to infancy and the wonders of the mobile whirling over our heads, only now those wonders have identities: depth, distance, movement, colour.  She reconnects with traces of these wonders through her work, bringing them back into focus in everyday life.

Works available: Alfa Gallery

Instagram: @caroline.lambard

Caroline Lambard lives and works in London.  She is the co-founder and organiser of ideas-matter-sphere, a cross-disciplinary talks programme which hosted events in central London between 2011 and 2015.  This looked at wider connections across areas including the arts, sciences and engineering, with speakers and audiences sharing expertise, creativity and, importantly, enthusiasm.  Further information can be found here:  Ideas-matter-sphere archive.