Artist Statement | The subjects of this series are found ceramic and Styrofoam pieces I encounter on my walks, an important part of my creative practice. Walking also connects me to Robert Walser, a writer from whom I take much inspiration. His work delights in the world of the small, both in content and form, as he wrote many of his works on small torn pieces of paper. Painting these found objects is an homage to Walser’s microscripts as well as his “text of a text” style of writing, in which he often explicitly introduces elements of a narrative before writing the narrative itself. The objects I paint are fragments of somewhere or someone else by their very nature of being found—to me, thinking about these things gets at the subtle humor of Walser’s work, using scope and attention to walk the line between the concrete and abstract.

Carson Whitmore is a recent Regional Emerging Artist at Artspace. She works in both paint and textile, and her practice is informed by an interest in the material world and a belief that exploration of process is never wasted time. You can view Carson’s work at carsonwhitmore.com.