1-SELF
Essay exerpt from artist's handmade "bookalog"
September, 2005
Piecework
...Each cut fabric piece remains, however, a mere scrap until joined into something larger than itself. It is in this context of incompleteness-and consequent imperfection-that Carol Es has deliberately chosen to affix garment patterns to her artwork. There is defiance in her choice. By this action, she acknowledges the pattern of familial dysfunction that gave shape to her early life. While calling specific attention to the symbolic elements of father, mother, brother, and self, however, she refuses them integration into an unwholesome whole.
Instead, Es rearranges the pieces of neglect, betrayal, and silence to her satisfaction, creating her very own sense of order and, as contradictory as it may seem to outsiders, even beauty. As time has gone by, she has learned to trust viewers with her vulnerabilities. While she understands that it is impossible for them to know what she knows, they can share in her discovery of value in the transformation of disharmony into new harmonies...
Kristina Newhouse
Curator, Torrance Art Museum