Caro Pattle

Born 1985, Aotearoa (New Zealand). Naarm based since 2014.

Caro Pattle’s experimental object-based practice explores handcraft processes through a lens of contemporary materiality. She draws from a range of craft disciplines to create works that joyfully muddle organic/synthetic, past/present and functional/non-functional binaries. Pattle’s practice spans large-scale public art installation through to objects for interiors and is underpinned by ongoing research into material culture, tactility, and movement. Embedded across all of her output is a sense of pleasure and play.

Melboune Design Fair 2023

For NGV Design Fair 2023 Pattle presents a new series of highly-crafted hand-woven objects which build upon her previous years' Amphorae works in an ongoing fascination with material culture.

Weaving with contemporary textiles of stretch velvet and synthetic taffeta, Pattle recreates megalithic stone and divination rods; both objects which sit at a meeting point between human culture and the natural world. Pattle's densely woven Monuments are tributes to France's alignements de Carnac, a large Neolithic site comprised of more than 3000 roughly hewn stones positioned in meandering columns to form a porous symbolic border between land and sea.

Luck-rods, variously called dowsing or divination sticks, are a pseudoscientific apparatus, channeling earthly vibrations to lead the rod's bearer towards water, oil or other precious material.

In Pattle's hands, both stick and stone are re-worked and embellished as objects of ritual and exchange.

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Caro’s projects span large-scale public art installation through to objects for interior worlds. Caro graduated from a Bachelor of Textiles at RMIT in 2019. The recipient of several travel grants and industry prizes, she was named the Australian Textile Graduate of the Year by the Design Institute of Australia for 2020 and was shortlisted for the Design Files Awards 2021.

View works by Caro Pattle for Melbourne Design Fair 2023 here.