Caroline Dear foraging for materials on the Isle of Skye | Photography © Lydia Smith
Caroline Dear
Artist & Botanist
Caroline Dear’s work revives the cultural and symbolic significance of traditional female garments through the act of making. By using locally sourced materials and slow, meditative processes, her practice embodies a profound connection to heritage, ritual, and the timeless relationship between maker, material and community.
Made using native plants and simple weaving skills, Dear’s works are contemporary versions of traditional female clothing. The Earasaid was a draped women’s dress garment worn bound with a belt across the waist. It was less colourful than male plaid, and often embroidered with the women’s initials. Her piece Veiled evokes both the fragility of the thin fescue grass used and our limited ‘veiled’ perception of the world around us.
Dear uses processes which take time. The plants she uses pass through her hands many times; gathering and processing, then making thread and weaving. This slow, meditative method of making is fundamental to her practice, as she feels herself embodied in the final pieces.
Biography
Caroline Dear worked as an architect and landscape architect in various countries before settling on the Isle of Skye in the 1980s. Working along the edge between producing artefacts and seeding ideas, her practice is informed by archaeology, Gaelic culture, botany and traditional skills. Through exploring the relationship between our inner selves and the outer physical landscape she engages with people to value the unnoticed and the undervalued. Recent qualifications include a Certificate in Field Botany from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh and a Masters in Art and Social Practice from the University of the Highlands and Islands, 2020.
Recent exhibitions include the string/lines project exhibited in venues across Scotland (2022-24); Daughters of Penelope, Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh (2018); A Layered Land, Timespan, Helmsdale (2017); flora, Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Aberystwyth, (2017); Naked Craft, Burlington Art Gallery, Quebec (2016); Vassen Susar, Eckerö Post and Custom’s House, Åland, Finland (2016); and undertook residencies in Norway, Denmark and Finland. Dear was recently awarded the Walmsley Bursary to work with The Highland Folk Museum, Newtonmore, 2023 and contributed to the publication The Material Culture of Basketry, edited by S.Bunn and V.Mitchell, 2023.