ARTIST STATEMENT
My work is a performance of identities, and in this current era of my life, there is nothing bigger than (m)other. Through costume, sculpture, and portraits I contextualize my gayness, my motherness, carework, my lesbian family and our shifting dynamics. Textiles and objects create our own family lineage. In costume I can be a fool, be absurd, subversive in plain sight, and be resistant to the expectations of my identity as a caretaker. I am playing with the tensions between what is adult and what is child material. Is a mask merely a costume? Who is leading who? The Objects of Play series is based on how I engage with the “stuff” of toddlerhood.
The physical and emotional demands of parenting have turned our world into the subject of my art. I am exploring the body, blurred boundaries, and the objects of my toddler’s obsessions that fill our home. I have fallen back in love with the radical act of play. In Bound Up In You Again, a mother sits consumed and bound in her child’s toys and feeding pillow. She’s gazing at the viewer, tired now—maybe forever, adorned, burdened, and asking to be seen. In Coffee Break, two mothers take a much needed break from being our child’s play partners. Velvet rope is sensuous, heavy, and boundary making. Made from printed images of my child’s painting “It’s a dragon with cat and fire in the woods,” the tactile and practical implications of velvet rope become more playful and undefined.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Caroline McAuliffe is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and community organizer. She blends life and art through costume and play to explore the identity-shifting experience of motherhood and its myths. Caroline holds an M.F.A. from Pratt Institute and currently works as an arts educator in New York City. Her work has appeared in group shows both nationally and internationally, including the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey, The Children’s Museum of Arts in Manhattan, Kyoto Shibori Museum, Japan, and the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, South Korea. She is a finalist for both the 2023 Procreate Mother Art prize and Women’s United Art Prize: Photography, a semifinalist for the 2025 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition: Smithsonian Institute, and a 2025 fellow of Saltonstall Residency.
Her work appears on the cover of the 2024 novel Choose This Now by Nicole Haroutunian. She is a founding member of the Mother Creatrix Collective, a group of mother artists and curators in New York. Together, they serve not only as a community of support but also as organizers, creating platforms that highlight the voices and experiences of artists navigating the complex intersections of motherhood, caregiving, and artistic practice. Caroline currently lives and creates in Brooklyn with her wife and child.
© Caroline McAuliffe