CAROLANNE PATTERSON
(United States, New Haven, Connecticut)
Host organization: State Silk Museum (Tbilisi, Georgia)
Cocoon Room is an installation created by Carolanne Patterson during her residency at the State Silk Museum in autumn 2021, which she has generously donated to the museum. The structure of the installation was constructed by Factory. Without Museum Objects is a series of events that respond to the Silk Museum’s rehabilitation period, its transitional stage, the spaces in the process of renewal, and the topics of exposition. The project is created and curated by Data Chigholashvili.
⠀
Inside a “cocoon,” surrounded by a silk layer through which the images of moths and giant cocoons can be noticed; roofed with archival images of sericulture – mulberry tree and leaves, silkworms, cocoons, a pupa, moths.
⠀
Data Chigholashvili, curator of the Museum writes in the Museum’s blog: ‘Fascinated by mulberry trees, I always think of them as a starting point in sericulture. After all, its leaves are the main nutrient for silkworms. I think the mulberry tree was in a way a starting point for Carolanne Patterson’s installation – “Cocoon Room” – wherein I am attempting to meditate. Originally conceived as an outdoor installation around a tree as a healing circle, a meditation room, it currently stands among empty vitrines and walls, and boxes and lines of wrapped muselia, as the Silk Museum is now going through a rehabilitation process. Without Museum Objects responds to the museum’s specificity and this transitional phase through different activities, and now, with all the objects from the hall wrapped, Cocoon Room gives a possibility to stay a little distanced from the noise and the routine of the outside, and meditate, or just take a breath’.
Carolanne Patterson is a visual artist and educator whose work spans the realms of hand made and digital processes. Her current research involves skewing environmental systems within the scope of unfamiliar realities. She is producing a group of free-standing rooms for hiding and meditation which provide an atmosphere in which to question the ambiguous territory of time and place. She has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship and residencies in the US and Europe, where she has exhibited widely. Carolanne currently teaches at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and Rhode Island School of Design.