Carola Colley
Interdisciplinary Contemporary Artist.
I follow several generations of women artists on my mother’s side. I grew up in Malaysia immersed in art and surrounded by painters and sculptors and their work. I went to art school first in Paris, and then completed a degree in sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art. I then spent several years living and working in Portugal and Hungary before settling on the Isle of Man, UK for twenty years, exhibiting widely and running workshops for all ages from my studio. From there I moved first to Cornwall and then Oxfordshire before settling in the Algarve, where I am currently enjoying working in my studio in the hills just north of São Brás de Alportel.
I have a fascination with materials; my work is a constant exploration of media. I love the Annie Albers quote ‘ Being creative is not so much the desire to do something as the listening to that which wants to be done: the dictation of the materials’ I have enjoyed collaborating with artists and poets and many of my recent projects have been the result of this cross fertilisation. Themes of history, sacred landscape, myth and liminality interest me along with anything Neolithic. But the core of my practice is drawing - from life, from landscape, from artifacts in museums – just pencil to paper and from there work develops.