Makers in Residence: Caro Pattle

During her Makers in Residence, Caro Pattle will be weaving an occasional table out of stretch velvet. While the piece will be Pattle’s most functional object to date, it will ultimately still sit alongside the rest of her practice within a nexus of function/disfunction. Through her residency project, Pattle will invite audiences to follow along as she extends her technical skills exploring new possibilities and creative avenues.

Photography by Annika Kafcaloudis.

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 historical and current material culture, animism, and domestic worlds. Embedded across all of her output is a sense of pleasure and play.

Pattle (Born 1985, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Naarm based since 2014) graduated from a Bachelor of Textiles at RMIT in 2019 with a previous Bachelor of Fine Arts completed in 2009. 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 and the Vivid Design Prize in 2022. In 2022, Pattle’s work was presented at the inaugural NGV Melbourne Design Fair and selected for the group exhibitions: Improper Structures, By/Product and Welcome.