Caroline Burraway

A recent graduate of St. Martin's School of Art, London (2006), Caroline Burraway has since collaborated with a number of charities and hospitals to produce a body of work which confronts the viewer with stark images of people in society we have become unwilling to see. Derived from film footage she produced of terminally ill patients, seemingly in the last gasp of life, her huge charcoal drawings are handled with extraordinary aplomb through her technical mastery of the medium. Her avoidance of the use of aesthetics as much as her selection of subject matter goes to produce imagery that is stark, oppressive but highly potent and charged.

Statement of works

Caroline Burraway‘s videos and oversized drawings confront the viewer with the
experiences of those people on the margins of society, those who suffer because of their
situation.  She is looking for a visual language that is truthful and points to the space that
exists beyond the screen of representation; for what lies hidden beneath in the everyday,
in the real lived experience of ‘the unspecial, the unchosen people’, their relationship to
society and culture, their social marginalisation, loneliness and alienation, their struggle
for identity and a sense of self.
In modern society death is pushed to the margins, our contact with it diminished and its
impact sanitised.  The old and sick no longer die at home surrounded by family but lie
hidden behind hospital curtains and as such many of those dying experience a sense of
loneliness and isolation.
She invites you, the viewer, to look through a ‘peephole’ into a private room, a life. You
may feel curious, a sense of voyeurism and discomfort perhaps as you observe this other
in a private and intimate space. And yet she asks, if you and I cannot be witness to these
images, if we avert our eyes from the ‘unseeable’, from that which we do not understand,
that which we cannot identify with and that which, through fear and denial, we will not
allow ourselves to identify with, how can we begin to understand the complexity and
diversity of the world we live in.

There is a distinction between those who remain inside the cave, shutting their eyes and
imagining the journey, and those who really take it … We must prefer real hell to an
imaginary paradise.  Weil, 1963 

‘Perfection and the Monster’ Part I and Part II
charcoal, 195cm x 135cm 

This work relates to the dialect concerning the inter-connectedness between perfection
and inferiority (monstrosity).  Both are placed in the same class, that of excess, what is
beyond no longer differs from what is short of a limit, that is the essence of the code
(perfection) has, in the end, the same status as what is outside the code (the monster).
Both are enmeshed in a mutual dependency. 

Video 

Extracts of video work selected from a series documenting the last three years of
Kathleen’s life in a residential home.  These works confront the dialectic between the
banality of the everyday and a complex social message.  They are concerned with
underlying social realities and with the individual’s isolation and marginalization from
society.