F.E.A.R.S.

(Finally Everything as Remembered Simultaneously)

                                                                               Photography: C. Timothy Barkley

In 1977, The Bubble Blower was exhibited in the Bienville Gallery in New Orleans. The director, Ed Weigand, was only interested in showing humanist art. He called me the “Shirley Temple of the Bienville Gallery”, but I was really Blanche DuBois. The pencil and color pencil drawings were as fragile as Tennessee Williams’ character. (He never told us what happened to her later. She had come from “refinement” in Mississippi into the raw New Orleans esthetic, in the form of Stanley Kowalski, and went psychotic.) Nothing sold at the gallery, which wasn’t unusual for that type of art in the 70’s. But I looked at those drawings and questioned what was keeping me there. And I realized it was fear, not real fear (although some was valid, like economic survival) but psychological fear. I decided to use the other abstract forms to act out my fears. I finished nine drawings and decided that to give them more reality, I had to make them three-dimensional. I started making “Growth” in clay and teeth of green combs, when I realized my survival depended on getting out of the destructive environment where I lived, or existed, as a martyr.

That was 1978 and it was more than ten years before I was able to get back to that work. The first piece I made in 1991 was the sculpture, “Growth“. Green combs were now out of style, and finding them was a challenge I hadn’t expected. Now it is the twenty-first century, and I claim the “breast” in me, knowing more than ever the value of nurturing that it represents, nurturing oneself and nurturing others. “Rock of Ages” was once “Fortress” and became a visual metaphor for the fear of turning into rock. “Petrification” was a term used by the psychiatrist, R. D. Laing, M.D., to define a neurotic or psychotic state of ontological insecurity subconsciously caused by the patient trying to protect its soul. Now the rocks are well polished, selected for their beauty, and are a metaphor for survival of the strong, or strong willed. “The Grass is Greener” was “Growth” (from the original bubble blower drawings), symbolizing the fear of growing up. The original drawing, like the sculpture, had plates of metal being peeled away with raw, bleeding skin underneath to represent the necessary pain of the maturation process. Now the soothing eye gel protects the inverted nipple nurturing the breast of plastic green pasture. "Introverted Nipple with Lures" isn’t as easily related to the original bubble blowers. In the original working drawings, there was one covered in fish scales that I left out. I was trying to make it a mermaid, but I found no way to relate it to the others. When I saw those pink lures at the hardware store, I couldn’t resist. (The lures were made by The Fat Boy Lure Company in Climax, N.C.) The next find were the iridescent sequins in the craft store and then the fabric that looked like something out of Gone with the Wind. The lures, the hooks, are all tools of the southern female trade, yet suggestive of the southern male pastime of fishing. Maybe this is Maggie, the cat, right out of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. (I have lived one of her lives, too.)

Art has been my means of survival. I share that with many writers and artists, the famous and the not so famous. I just have never been able to engage myself in just the materials of the trade, be it paint, pencil or stone, or in just the form. It was never enough.

Carol Cole's artistic career spans over forty years. Born in 1943 in Mississippi, she has been working and living in Greensboro, NC, since 1984. Her solo exhibitions include CAM, Raleigh, NC; Seed Space, Nashville, TN; ADA gallery, Richmond, VA; Salem College Fine Arts Gallery, Winston-Salem, NC; and Camera Oscura, San Casciano dei Bagni, Italy. Her work has been included in many group exhibitions in NYC galleries, including Raving Disco Dolly on a Rock ‘n Roll Trolley at envoy enterprises, The Visible Vagina at Francis M. Naumann Fine Arts, Paper A-Z at Sue Scott Gallery, The Crooked Mirror at envoy enterprises, and Body Language at George Adams Gallery. Her work has also been in the traveling exhibitions: Aquarius: On the Interaction of Water and the Human Being, in Austria and Germany; H20, Imagination’s Matrix, in five venues across the USA; and Thinking in Blood; Conflict and Culture in the American South, which also traveled extensively in the USA. In 2006, The Bubble Blower, an artist book of her drawings, sculptures, and poetry, edited by Cornelia Lauf, with an essay by Irene Tsatsos, designed by Christophe Boutin, was published by One Star Press, Paris, France. In 2007, Cole curated What F Word?, an exhibition at Cynthia Broan Gallery in NYC, of women artists, which was positively reviewed in The New York Times and Art in America.