Carrie-Ann Stein is a theatre designer and fine artist with a particular interest in daydreams, cognitive psychology and fragmentary dialectics. Her work explores the construction of personal identity from incomplete and unresolved childhood memories; and how daydreams might be transformed into grand abstract operettas providing an escape for the dreamer into worlds of infinite variety exploding with excess and intensity.
Carrie-Ann Stein
During her time at the Royal College of Art, Carrie has identified memory, narrative and daydreaming as vital features of her practice. She begins with recording abstract photographs taken in backstage theatre areas. Later, particular patterns of shape, tone and contrast are abstracted from these photographs which might become a catalyst for designing an entirely fictional scene.
The construction of abstract narratives acts like a 'geometry of echoes' inciting flashbacks to childhood memories of domestic events that are difficult to define and with a 'focal radiation from an inexact centre' (The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard, 1964). The poetics of Bachelard and Charles Baudelaire fuel Carrie's thinking concerning intimacy and infinity with regard to personal identity.
With a first career in law, Carrie had a particular interest in family and child proceedings. During a career break to raise a family, she gained a BA in Fashion Design from Central Saint Martins and a further BA with the Royal Opera House in Costume Construction. These studies were followed by the development of Carrie's practice into set and costume design for performance supported by the Linbury Prize for Theatre Design, a Royal Opera House Bursary and a Costume Society Award.
Carrie's practice is motivated by the production and installation of fictional and visual abstract operettas with which to entertain and provoke the viewer. Working in a theatre, Carrie is uniquely placed to understand the power of performance and narrative in engaging an audience and sets herself the challenge of transporting the dreamer from the immediate world to an infinite space of imagination and possibility using 2D printmaking processes.
Her prow rises from the waves. The lightning flash reveals her. And the rude sea grows civil at her song –
The immensities of sea and land are captured from daydreams, designed with the potential for performance, giving life to lives that exist far beyond the ordinary but with human passions as their guiding foundation.
The digital c-type print is a photographic print using digital technology. The paper is exposed using red, blue and green lasers or LEDs and then the paper is processed in a photographic developer followed by a fix of bleach before washing.
Medium:
Digital c-type printSize:
1500mm x 2000mm
Charged Subterranea and Freud’s Void: the Labyrinthine Warehouse of Splintered Memories, Past Relics and Debris –
The French poet Charles Baudelaire favoured the word 'vast', using it to describe the dreaming person "as the prey of great projects, oppressed by vast thoughts." The process of making intense, dense imagery can be psychologically transcendent for a small cost.
Medium:
Digital c-type printSize:
2000mm x 1500mm
Valleys, Troughs, Lines and Curves –
Abstracting drapery, floating planes and creating new intimacies between hard surfaces and folds
Processing the Festoon –
Abstracting, revealing and concealing the relationship between the theatre curtain and the stage as separate entities from the scenery, actors and audience.
Printed Pamphlet –
The postcard sized pamphlet opens out into a 100cm x 70cm print of 'Processing the Festoon'.
Processing the Festoon at Dilston Grove, Southwark Park Gallery –
A framed print of 'Processing the Festoon' on display at Dilston Grove, Southwark Park Gallery in 2023.
CMYK is a four-colour process using cyan, magenta, yellow and key (black) It is a method of printing that relies on layered dots of colour to mask the white background of the paper.
Medium:
Digital print on paper and CMYK screen print on paperSize:
100cm x 70cm
Spotlight –
The solitude of the performance space can house daydreams and nightmares of infinity, ultimate depths and the most secret regions of being. It is a place for deep reflection and direct response.
Medium:
Digital collage ink jet printSize:
841mm x 594mm
Retreat and Expansion –
Rhythms of geometry, retreat and expansion of pattern, interference and clarity.
A Spectacle Complex –
Momentary freedom from the powers of gravity.
Infinity of Intimate Space –
Memories of the future: building them better, lighter and larger than all the memories of the past.
Colours of Chrysalis –
Levitation of planes and rhythms of motion and colour in detail. Two dreams conjoining: fear and transformation with the repose and flight of being in transition.