Carrie Jean Goldsmith b. 1971

Carrie Jean Goldsmith creates abstract works in which colour, light and tonal gradation are key elements. Her layered process celebrates the varying brush marks and luminosity of paint, creating imagery that is compelling yet ambiguous, with a persistent sense of light and, at times, an elusive relationship to place. Her palette draws on the deep, shifting hues of nature, balancing expressionism with informed thought and moving between landscape associations and a purely abstract aesthetic.
Goldsmith’s interest in the ambiguous and the evocative has, in part, a personal resonance. Her paternal grandparents were British, while her maternal grandparents came from Bukowina in the Carpathians. Her grandmother rarely spoke of her origins, and her familiar yet somehow other accent only deepened the mystery surrounding a past Goldsmith longed to understand. As a child, she would sneak into the attic in search of photographs or clues, inventing dark fairytales about the life that had been left unexplained. That sense of an elusive past, of place felt rather than fully known, continues to inform the atmospheric and ambiguous nature of Goldsmith’s work.