Patrick Carroll: Dungeness

In the East Wing, Goldfinch is excited to present Dungeness, a solo exhibition of new knitted works by Los Angeles-based artist and writer Patrick Carroll.

Stretched like paintings, but knit like garments, Patrick Carroll’s text-based pieces play with what it means to be “permanently under tension,” as the artist describes. As explorations of language’s materiality, Carroll’s text-based knits, or “picture-poem-paintings,” in the artist’s words, employ painterly techniques in regards to the weights and luminosities of color, while exploring relationships between concept, form, material, and linguistics. As Carroll explains, “making text with knits under tension produces an encounter with language that is meaningfully different from language carved in stone, from language painted on a surface, from language printed, molded, woven, etc.” Nodding to the shared etymologies of “text” and “textile” (both from the Latin texere, ‘to weave’), Carroll’s exploration of language through thread and the tension of knitted forms, “allows the pieces to function as ‘portals’ onto the concepts their language describes.”

These ‘portals’ and the language they explore are sourced from the journals of British artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman, kept during his time in Dungeness, Kent, where he lived from 1986 until 1994, when he died from AIDS-related illness. Prospect Cottage, where Jarman lived, wrote, made work, and cultivated a wild and unlikely garden, sits in a dry, barren landscape (Britain’s only ‘desert’), a short distance from a nuclear power plant. Jarman famously said, “My garden’s boundaries are the horizon.” In Carroll’s “Dungeness,” Jarman’s slow and focused observations of birds, his garden, and the solitude of the landscape around him, are knitted into pieces that come in and out focus, legible from different distances and angles. Like the patient acts of gardening—observing seasonal shifts and the behavior of plants—and of slow, careful reading, Carroll’s practice of knitting language creates, in his words, “a series of looping resolutions, concepts emerging and devouring each other…never touching down.”
 

Artist's Bio
Patrick Carroll (b. 1990) was born in Menlo Park, California. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He received his MFA in Fiction Writing at the University of Riverside in 2021. Selected exhibition include Reading (2023), Giovanni’s Room, Any distance between us, curated by Stephen Truax and Dominic Molon, RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island (2021), Installation at the JW Anderson Men’s SS23 & Women’s Resort 23 Show, Milan, Italy (2022), Memoriam, Fuji Textile Week, Fujiyoshida, Japan (2022), Lilac, Moonbeam, and Heavenly Blue, organized by Dove Drury Hornbuckle, Goldfinch Gallery, Chicago, Illinois (2023).